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Ca.
chan
pret-a-penser.
On a pu constater que des neurones trop long- quotidiens et magazines dont les 50 meilleurs
temps enfermés dans la pensée hexagonale K* journaux du monde, Courrier International
finissaient par perdre de leur exerce une action extrême-
vigueur. Il est donc vivement
conseillé de leur faire prendre
l'air du large chaque semaine.
Correspondant de plus de 600
ment vivifiante sur le cerveau,
en l'ouvrant à des informations,
des points de vue, qu'on ne
trouve pas ailleurs.
THE UNESCO Q)URIER
For Haitian-bom painterHervé Télémaque, art is more necessarythan ever in the modern world 4
A baroque church in the Philippines
(p. 44), where an unusual composite stylegrew out of collaboration between Spanishmissionaries and local craftsmen.
contentsNOVEMBER 1996
THE MARKETPLACE
PAST
»i . -
Month by month by Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat 8
The birth of homo economicus by Alain Caillé
pre-columbian America Tlatelolco, shop window of the Aztec empireby María Rebeca Yoma Medina and Luis Alberto Martos López
italy The merchants of Venice by Donatella Calabi
brazil Open market or closed shop? by Marie-France Garcia-Parpet
áfrica A tradition of cross-border trade by Alix Servais Afouda
France Friday in Carpentras by Michèle de la Pradelle
Russia A puzzling transition by Yuri Levada
japan Company capitalism by Hiroshi Okumura
Market globalization by Marie-France Baud
The rise of the stock market by Emmanuel Vaillant
Fact file
Consultants: Emmanuel Vaillant and Emmanuelle Lallement
Commentary Federico Mayor
GREENWATCH
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park by France Bequette
HERITAGE
Baroque churches of the Philippines by Augusto Fabella Villalón
LISTENING
The hidden voice of Frederic Mompou by Isabelle Leymarie
ANNIVERSARY
Jean Piaget, a foundational thinker by Richard Schumaker
As it was... The Unesco Courier November 1980
The psychology of marbles by Jean Piaget
10
14
17
19
22
24
26
29
33
36
37
47
48
49
Cover: Market scene in Mexico (1987). The signature of this painting is indecipherable. Perhaps a readerwill be able to solve the mystery for us. . . .
© Thierry Nectoux, Paris
THE UNESCO tOURIERM NOVEMBER 1996
interview
MHervé Télémaque
rt tells the storyof our time on earth
Haitian-born artist Hervé Télémaque uses a mixture oftechniques and materialspainting and collage, salvagedobjects and graffitito create works that attempt to infuse"new energy" into images and words. Here he talks to
Juliette Broussard about his artistic development and hisconception of painting.
Grâce à Dieu (1994),
wood and coffee grounds (127 x 83 cm)
by Hervé Télémaque.© K. Igniatiadïs. ADAGP 1996. Galerie Louis Carré, Paris
You've been living in France for thirty-five years,
but your work is increasingly evocative of your
Haitian roots and culture.
Hervé Télémaque: I left Port-au-Prince in 1957
when François Duvalier came to power and
went to study painting at the Art Students'
League in New York. I was only in the United
States for three years, hut in a sense I am
American simply because I was horn in the
Caribbean basin, which is close to the United
States and dominated by its models. But in
New York I became afraid of losing my identity.
It was partly because of my quest for identity
that I moved to France in 1961. I wanted to
find myself. Besides, in New York abstract
expressionism was running out of steam and
hardening into an academicism that didn't
interest me. This was just prior to the renewal
THEUNESCoC3URlER" NOVEMBERI996
David Harali. Pans
that came in with pop art. Moreover, France is
an integral part of Haitian culture, its fantasies
and its relationship with language. Since Haiti
is French-speaking, returning to Europe was a
move towards my formative values.
How much have you been influenced by the
surrealists?
H.T.: The surrealists showed me values that still
govern my creative energy. My relationship to art
is defined by psychoanalytical experimentation.
I've remained very close to the plastic values
expressed by Arshile Gorky, Giorgio de Chirico,
Bene Magritte and Marcel Duchamp. The sur¬
realists taught me that art could be a way of
comprehending both the world and oneself. This
self-knowledge naturally leads to all sorts of
moral questions: relationships between people,
love, social organization. One of the lessons of
surrealism that I've always believed in is that the
visual is not only a source of aesthetic pleasure
but that its force lies in expressing a certain
experience and an ambitious perception of exis¬
tence. Art tells the story of our time on earth.
Afeel for language is very apparent in
everything you do.
H. T.: I love Haitian poetry, the work of people
like Jacques Boumain and Carl Brouard, who
define black identity. From very early on
Haitian poetry, tuned in as it was to the history
of the colonization of Santo Domingo, to slavery
and the Haitian revolution of 1804, gave body
to the concepts of négritude and black pride,
concepts which Aimé Césaire later brought to
a white heat in his great poem, Return to My
Native Land. Apart from that, I've remained
faithful to the poets I loved reading when I was
young Bimbaud, Saint-John Perse and André
Breton. I like to quote what Saint-John Perse
said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1960, "For if poetry is
not, as it has been said, 'absolute reality', it is
the closest we can get to understanding it, at
that extreme limit of complicity where reality
in the poem seems to inform itself."
How do you work?
H. T.: My way of working can be broken down into
three stages. First of all I play around with the
medium, then this is the second stage some¬
thing clicks, a specific formal idea emerges. The
third stage is when I put it all together.
Technique only comes in at this final stage,
which is subsidiary to the spontaneous original
idea and to playing around with forms waiting to
see what happens. My large charcoal drawings,
which are more lyrical and stylistically unified,
serve the formal idea by trying to capture a fan¬
tasy, a memory or a desire as simply as possible.
In them objects become coats of arms, totems
dQiTHEUNESCO tOURIERB NOVEMBER 1 006 '
interview and emblems. I work with simple materials
wood, glue and screws. I use clamps. I love basic
tools like the saw, which I sometimes use as a
pencil, or the sander.
Take the charcoal drawings and objects that
were shown at an exhibition of my work in 1994,
Fusain et marc de café ("Charcoal and Coffee
Grounds"), Deuil: le dessin, l'objet ("Mourning:
the Drawing, the Object"). For the objects I
used coffee grounds, a natural pigment, but to
ironic effect. The dark charcoal evokes night,
whereas the coffee could symbolize the transi¬
tion from dark to light, from night to dawn it's
also an exotic colonial product that has given a
lot of pleasure to white people.
What about colour?
H. T.: I use colour like a signal. In 1986, when
the Duvalier regime ended, Haitians made sym¬
bolic use of red and blue, the colours of the
national flag. The whole island was daubed with
red and blue as part of a groundswell of popu¬
lar feeling, a symbolic explosion after liberation
from thirty years of dictatorship. I was very
touched by the vulnerability of my people, who
had nothing left but this sign, this simple mark¬
ing in red and blue, as proof of their existence.
I reduced my palette to those two elements, to
that basic signal of identity.
You are movingfrom a ratherintellectual
position towards simpler values.
H. T.: Perhaps one grows simpler with age!
While my works may once have been a bit too
much of a virtuoso performance, I'm more sure
of myself now. Doesn't all art tend towards sim¬
plicity and anonymity? Painters dabble with
objects and ideas, manipulate signs and use
their intuition. Artists are too often lumped
together with intellectuals. My feeling is that
artists should listen to their inner selves, give
expression to their creativity and avoid self-cen¬
sorship. My art is never programmed. What's
best in artists wends its way through them
without any strict programming. I also think it's
a good thing to let memories float to the sur¬
face. I once saw a magazine photo of a woman
in Soweto in South Africa whose fat legs
V.
reminded me of the legs of my old nanny,
Christiane. There was no direct connection
between the two, but it was a moment that
brought a memory back to the surface. I think
there are no lies in art.
As an artist, where do you stand in today's
culture and society?
H. T.: It seems to me there's a crisis in the visual
arts, and it's good to get back to simple, basic
things. My current work is dominated by my
love of drawing. Drawing on a sheet of paper is
simpler than painting. From drawing I go
straight to objects, and that means colour. I am
first and foremost a painter. A painter-assem¬
bler, if you like. I regard painting as the most
advanced, the most complex of the visual arts.
The arts seem to me to be a natural vehicle for
greater understanding between cultures. Just
think how immersed we all are in jazz, without
6THE UNESCO lOURIER! NOVEMBER 1996
Marc French © Panos Pictures, London
A tailor in Port-au-Prince
(Haiti).realizing it. Blacks have made a big contribu¬
tion through music. Music is the way to an
understanding of the black character. We all
travel, we all move endlessly from place to
place. What worries me is the bulldozer effect
of world television that broadcasts the same
series all over the planet. I feel we are going
through a schizophrenic period. It's more, nec¬
essary than ever to be receptive to one's inner
self, to be alert to one's own dreams. It makes
me think again of Saint-John Perse, who urged
us not to forget the man of clay.
Do people still think of art as a necessity?
H. T.: Absolutely! But the meaning of culture
must be redefined. Look at the United States.
You might think that such a materialistic soci¬
ety could do without art. But look at all the
great American artists there are! They prove
that there is a need for art, that art is useful
otherwise it wouldn't exist. The museums and
the number of people who go to them are
ample proof of this.
Has contemporary art emerged from an older art?
H. T.: The widespread interest in the art forms
of the past arose at the beginning of this cen¬
tury with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In
my case it was during a visit to Egypt that I
found a kind of basis for modern art. In the art
of the ancient Egyptians I saw a justification for
certain major choices stylistic clarity, direct¬
ness and the link with language. With hiero¬
glyphics we move from a painted image to a
written sign, which is very modern, for this
question of moving from writing to the visual is
still highly topical. It was in Egypt that I found
an art that probably heralds all Western cul¬
ture. And has never been bettered. To my mind
its characteristics area very high level of refine¬
ment and a message of great complexity.
Despite this complexity, I am fascinated by the
accessibility of this art, by its regard for essen¬
tials, its lack of any leanings towards naturalism.
Of course I am simply talking about its formal
aspects, since I am not capable of deciphering
the whole Egyptian cosmogony. With its exquis¬
ite draughtsmanship and sense of volume,
ancient Egyptian art is in complete contrast, to
take one example, with the simplicity of
Oceanian sculpture, which is nonetheless one of
the pinnacles of world art. With the Egyptians
a whole world is constructed, whereas in New
Guinea, we're listening to primal humanity,
closer to the earth and the gods.
Does art teaching today succeed in making
students aware of contemporary art?
H. T.: Contrary to what is widely thought, mod¬
ern art even abstract art seems to me more
accessible than the high art of the Benaissance,
for example, which often calls for knowledge of
the great myths and of religion. I think modern
art is a more direct mirror, favourable to an inter¬
change between the work of art and its audi¬
ence. In many cases its questioning of appear¬
ances makes use of irony, perhaps to express the
complexities of our time more accurately. I
THE UNESCO C3URIER" NOVEMBER 10967
TB& UNESCO
IjpURIER^^49th YEAR
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ISSN 0041-5278 N° 11-1996-OPI-96-553 A
This issue comprises 52 pages and a 4-page insertbetween pages 2-3 and 50-51.
MONTH BY MONTH... MONTH BY MONTH.
The marketplacepast and present
It has become virtually impossible to live in isola¬
tion from the marketplace. Our needs have
become so diversified that they can only be met
by constant recourse to products, services,finance and information available on the market.
And market transactions have become so inten¬
sive and so far-reaching that they are now planet-
wide. One might say that the pulse of world eco¬
nomic activity today is measured by the state ofthe market.
It has not always been so.
For thousands of years the market was only ofmarginal importance. On the one hand it broughtinto contact separate, self-sufficient communities
which exchanged among themselves goods that
were merely ancillary, inessential to their internal
balance. On the other, the people who engaged in
these transactions attached less importance to eco¬
nomic considerations than they did to the imper¬
atives of religion, custom and lineage that gov¬erned their lives.
But even within these limits, the market played
an extremely important role as a channel of com¬
munication. It was the only opportunity for closed
communities to open their doors, however
briefly, to the outside world, make contact with
others and catch a glimpse of human diversity. In
the long run, trade promoted the circulation ofideas, technical innovation and productive work.
In the modern age the status of the marketchanged. It ceased to be a mechanism of sec¬ondary exchange and became instead a mainspring
of social activity, the regulator of production. Theeconomy hitherto the servant of non-material¬istic ends which the group considered sacredbecame a law unto itself, gradually infiltrating intoall areas of life, harnessing everything within reach
to its purposes and eventually transforming allestablished values including cultural, traditional
8THE UNESCO ^>URIERB NOVEMBER 1906
NT MONTH BY MONTH...
by Bahgat Elnadiand Adel Rifaat
and moral values into commodities that could be
bought and sold.
Some reacted to this change by treating the
market itself as sacred, regarding it as an impartial
power governed by impersonal laws that would,
via competition, inevitably encourage the best and
penalize the mediocre. However, a closer lookleads to the conclusion that while the market acts
as an economic regulator and rationalizer, it tends
to develop a network of inegalitarian relationshipswithin which the law of the strongest triumphs
over the spirit of reciprocity.
Freedom and inequality
In fact, the market can be seen as a kind of fron¬
tier area inhabited by two contradictory princi¬
ples freedom and inequality between which
only imperfect compromises can ever be made. Ano-holds-barred free market is in fact a "free-for-
all", a confrontation between strong and weak lead¬
ing ultimately to situations where competition
ceases to exist, thus jeopardizing the very principleof freedom and resulting in the impoverishmentand exclusion of more and more economic agents.
Beyond a certain threshold, the process breaks thebonds that hold society together and even, taken toextremes, makes it impossible for commercial
activity to continue. And so, the argument goes,
there must be a counterweight to market forces;the law of the market must be contained and regu¬
lated by political bodies which endeavour to main¬tain a certain balance between unbridled economic
freedom and unchecked inequality.
Several attempts have been made this century
to strike such a balance. For a wide variety of rea¬
sons, most of these attempts have failed.
This explains why in the past few years all kinds
of attempts to liberalize markets and weaken theideological basis of political interventionism have
made great strides. The globalization of financial,technological and information flows, in these con¬
ditions, has created a highly volatile market that
knows no frontiers, is prone to unpredictable
developments and rapidly changing situations. Inthis globalized market competition favours big
transnational groups (while not preventing the
emergence of new pockets of prosperity) and nointernational body seems able to control economic
behaviour or arbitrate, politically or legally, the
conflicts resulting from it.
The globalization of corruption, siphoning offdrug money and feeding international crime, is one
dramatic symptom of this state of affairs which is
corroding the foundations of democracy and
undermining familiar religious, ethnic and nationallandmarks. It should come as no surprise that two
very different trends are developing in response to
this widespread corruption the strengthening ofdemocratic control mechanisms and recourse to
the dictatorship of closed identities.
The marketplace is thus a crossroads, a meeting
place of some key issues of the late twentieth cen¬
tury. In reporting on this crucial phenomenon we
have tried to shed light not only on the ways in
which it has changed and is changing but also, and
above all, on its contradictory aspects.
THE UNESCO COURIER« NOVEMBER 1996
The birth of homo
BY ALAIN CAILLE
I as economic man, the selfish, cal¬
culating and rational individual thateconomists place at the heart oftheir theoretical constructions,
I always existed? Is he universal or,on the contrary, was he spawned recently bycertain types of social relationships?
In areas where we today think in terms ofbargaining (buying and selling goods), ancientsocieties reasoned in terms of gifts (compul-sorily made, accepted and returned) andalliances, even if, according to the French soci¬ologist Marcel Mauss, the personal materialinterest that lies at the heart of commercial
exchange can always be detected behind thesepractices.
Prices fixed by custom
On the whole, the distribution of goods viathe major trading processes in ancient soci¬eties did not serve a utilitarian purpose somuch as satisfy a need for the extravagant andthe prestigious. It was not so much a matterof receiving and accumulating as of appearingin the most generous and magnificent possi¬ble light.
Similarly, the countable objects which arewidely regarded as being the forerunners ofmodern currency did not enable people tobuy anything they wanted, but only to pay thedebts of life and death. You paid the debt youhad contracted towards those who gave youwives (and the children they bore) in otherwords life and towards those families in
which you had caused a death. Trade grew uponly on the outer confines of those commu¬nities, as a result of contact with people who didnot belong to them: foreigners.
Evidence of long-distance trade goes back toprehistoric times, when certain goods travelledthousands of kilometres from their place of ori¬gin, but there is nothing to prove that such trad¬ing was organized in conformity with the prin¬ciples of the market. The Hungarian-borneconomist Karl Polanyi believed that there isnot necessarily any connection between tradeand the market as it is understood in economic
theory, or indeed between trade and village orlocal street markets. In Babylon and throughout
economicus
the ancient world of the Middle East, large-scaletrade was run and supervised by governmentofficials. International prices were fixed bydiplomatic treaties and could not be called intoquestion or altered by bargaining.
More generally, in what might be called tra¬ditional markets, prices existed before tradingtook place and were not readily affected by thevolume of that trading. They were social prices,fixed by custom, whereas the modern marketanalysed by economic theory is a self-regulatedmarket where prices are independent of socialrelationships between people and result fromthe interplay of supply and demand. InPolanyi's view, it is this divorce between themarket and social relationships in general thatcharacterizes economic modernity.
Medieval markets, and a large proportion ofmarkets in France during the Ancien Regime,when prices were strictly controlled, have lit¬tle in common with self-regulated markets. Itcan also be argued that the kind of trading prac¬tised by leading merchants in Genoa, Amalfi,Venice and the Hanseatic ports at the end of theMiddle Ages was venture- rather thanmarket-oriented. The profits they made,although sometimes considerable, were uncer¬tain and attendant on risk. They had no obviousconnection with the law of supply and demand.
By the end of the sixteenth century, inter¬national trade in cereals and the main metals
amounted to the equivalent of only about 1
»
À
M Sumerian clay tablet usedto record numbers of sheep
and goats (c. 2350 B.C.).
10THE UNESCO IpURItRB NOVEMBER 1006
per cent of basic consumption. The wealthiesthusbandmen sold only 15-20 per cent of theirharvests. This is still a far cry from a market-dominated economy.
An obsolete notion?
Let's take the argument further. Even withineconomics that are manifestly dependent onthe market, prices are less strictly conditionedby the law of supply and demand than eco¬nomic theory requires. Barely twenty yearsago in France, for instance, the fluctuations infish prices that resulted from varying catchsizes were to a large extent tempered by theneed for a stable relationship between the skip¬per and his crew on the one hand, and the skip¬per and the fish wholesalers on the other.Similarly, negotiations conducted within theGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT) provide ample proof that farm priceshave nothing to do with market prices. It mayeven be legitimate to ask whether the prices ofgoods in general, whatever their nature, are
IYI embers of the Melpaethnic group (Papua New
Guinea) proffer gifts as part of
a traditional form of exchange
known as moka.
not conditioned by power relationships or, ifyou like, by the socially recognized value ofthe individuals, groups, socio-profcssional cat¬egories and nations that produce them ratherthan by strictly material or economic volumes.
Much recent research has shown that the
functioning of actual markets, which hingeson a system of networks (monopolies or oli¬gopolies), has so little connection with whateconomic theory says about it that someauthorities believe that the notion of "the mar¬
ket" as such is now obsolete.
Lastly, it is well known that even in the mostcapitalist economies actual economic activityoften depends less on market requirementsthan on state and administrative norms. The
importance of the market's secondary role isfurther diminished by the fact that the bulk ofsocial life takes place in the field of interpersonalrelationships and not in the sphere of business,politics or administration. And these relation¬ships are governed not by money or the law,but by gifts and debts.
Those who challenge the historic singularity
THE UNESCO l^llKIERl NOVEMBER 1996 U
I he logo of GATT (GeneralAgreement on Tariffs and
Trade) in 1993. GATT has since
been replaced by the World
Trade Organization (WTO).
M,I erchants of the Hanseatic
League are shown in the port
of Hamburg in this miniature
from a manuscript of the city's
code of civil law dating fro m
1487. The Hanseatic League
was an association of north
German cities and merchants
trading in the Baltic
(12th-17th centuries).
of the market, on the other hand, believe that no
people is unaware of the existence or the pos¬sibility of self-interested exchange. Woven intothe noble and ceremonial trading process ofthe Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea(kula), for example, is the notion of utilitarianexchange, or swap (grimwali). Similarly,according to Marcel Mauss barter was notunknown among the Kwakiutl Indians of thenorthwest coast of North America, even
though they practised potlatch, a ceremonialfeast at which chiefs gave presents to enhancetheir status. If primitive cultures as a whole setsuch store by gifts, generosity and disinter¬estedness, it was not because they wereunaware of the existence of utilitarian or self-
interested motives, but rather through a con¬cern to maintain social cohesion, which would
have been jeopardized if venality had not beensubordinated to the practice of giving.
Supply and demandin the ancient world
So when did the self-regulated market firstappear? Polanyi admits, in The Livelihood ofMan (1977), that it already existed in Athensin the fifth century B.C. The detailed descrip¬tion of a market economy by Plato, which he
calls "a healthy city-state" (The Republic, II),establishes beyond all doubt that the innerworkings of the market were already wellknown in his time.
But even three centuries earlier, in China,
the prime minister of the state of Ch'i, KuanChong (730-645 B.C.), accurately described themechanism of supply and demand, and assertedthat the introduction of fixed prices, even ifthey were periodically reviewed, "would makeprice movements less fluid, hinder productionand inhibit economic activity".
It may therefore be argued that, while themarket can never be reduced simply to anexchange of a purely economic nature or to aset of impersonal relations unconnected withsocial, cultural or historical factors, there didemerge, very early on, a logical process gov¬erning production and consumption whichsuperseded that governing the reproduction ofsocial statuses. The essence of the market
resides in the specific momentum which thatprocess imparts to the circulation of goodswithin a given social system.
To abandon the notion of the market on the
pretext that the theoretical model cannot be real¬ized in its pure form would therefore seem to bea mistake. A more fruitful approach is to specify,in each individual case, how trade, the law and
making gifts interrelate as ordering structures.
The political interfaceIt would seem that for centuries before the
Western model spread throughout the worldthe human economy was chiefly notable forits diversity. Varying forms of self-regulatedmarket in a more or less pure form appeared atvarious points in the world, probably becausethey could be reached by natural communica¬tion routes such as seas and rivers. But in most
parts of the world knowledge of that form ofmarket remained incomplete and indirect, andwas mediatized by a considerable number ofother factors. Some regions remained totallyunaware of it until very recently.
Geographical diversity has been accompa¬nied by a historical variability which has meantthat the market appears at one moment, onlyto disappear the next. There is evidence of it inthe Roman Empire of the second centuryA.D., but it seems to wither away completelyduring the following centuries. Although wefind a theoretician of economic liberalism as
far back as the seventh century B.C., in theperson of Kuan Chong, the actual existenceof such a market after the imperial unificationof China seems more than doubtful. In
Europe, what produced the modern market atthe end of the Middle Ages was not large-scaletrade in luxury goods, but the alliance ofembryonic nation states with bankers and anascent bourgeoisie. Nation states and themodern market then became coextensive.
It may then be argued that while the mar-
12 THE UNESCO Q)l!E:LkB NOVEMBER 1996
VT'-'
A 16th-century Venetian
banker is depicted in
this watercolour by
Jan II van Grevenbroeck
(1731-1807).
ket economy existspotentially, in other wordsvirtually, in all societies, its actualizationdepends on specific factors peculiar to eachof them. They are factors which may bedescribed as political if the term is understoodto mean the way in which a society decides,in a conflictual relationship, what form its unityand singularity should take.
Where liberal economists go wrong is when
they contend that the market can be set up atwill, without any concern for how it contributesto the cohesion or dislocation of societies. The
example of the Third World some time ago andthe more recent example of the former SovietUnion show that, while there is such a thing asa logical market process, the crucial question ishow far it can operate freely. And this is a polit¬ical, not an economic, issue.
ALAIN CAILLE
is a French sociologist.
THE UNESCO COURIER« NOVEMBER I99ô13
PRE-COLUMBIANAMERICA Tlatelolco, shop window of
the Aztec empireBY MARÍA REBECA YOMA MEDINAAND LUÍS ALBERTO MARTOS LÓPEZ
M model of the city ofTlatelolco.
In pre-Columbian Mexico a great
market was held in the Aztec city of
Tlatelolco. Its size and organization
amazed the Spanish-conquistadors,
who had seen nothing like it in six¬
teenth-century Europe.
Tlatelolco was a part of the Aztec capital,
Tenochtitlán which, so legend has it, was
founded on an island in Lake Texcoco in 1325.
The site was ideal for exploiting the lake's
resources, but seed, fruit, vegetables, building
materials and many other essential goods had
to be brought in from outside. In 1337, an
Aztec splinter group founded an independent
city, Tlatelolco, on an island north ofTenochtitlán. The two cities soon became
r
rivals. Tlatelolco's strategic position and the
extraordinary business acumen of its inhabi-
- \*- -
:
\
tants were such that it acquired a formidable
commercial reputation.
A market suburb
At first the market of Tlatelolco dealt exclu¬
sively in primary products, but economic and
social development slowly encouraged the
growth of trade in luxury goods. This became
so important that an institution specializing in
long-distance trade was set up. It was known
as the Pochtecayotl and set up a trading net¬
work that reached as far as the provinces of
the Mayan empire.
In 1473, after a war in which no quarter
was given, Tlatelolco was defeated in battle by
an army from Tenochtitlán. Overnight the
proud city became a suburb of Tenochtitlán.
In view of the market's reputation and size,
however, the victors decided to encourage its
expansion by transporting to it a wide vari¬
ety of rare products from other cities and
regions of the Aztec empire.
The conquistadors'amazement
When the Spanish conquered Mexico, the
market of Tlatelolco was at the height of its
prosperity. Contemporary Spanish chroni¬
clers describe how the market place was
located to the east of the city's great ceremo¬
nial enclosure on a vast square esplanade with
sides 200 metres long, fully paved and level
14 THE UNESCO QllJRIER« NOVEMBER 1906
I he capital of the Aztecempire, Tenochtitlán, stood on
the site of what is now Mexico
City. Its rival city, Tlatelolco,
eventually became a suburb of
the great metropolis. Scene
from life in Tenochtitlán
(above) is a detail from a
series of murals by the
Mexican painter Diego Rivera
(1886-1957). The paintings,
which illustrate the history of
Mexico, are in the National
Palace, Mexico City.
MARIA REBECA YOMA MEDINA
and
LUÍS ALBERTO MARTOS LÓPEZ
are Mexican archaeologists.
and surrounded by arcades housing shops. At
the centre of the square was the momoztli, a
kind of truncated stepped pyramid which
was used for celebrations, ceremonies and
other public events.
Hernando Cortes, the Spanish conqueror
of Mexico, wrote that "This city has many
squares where trade and commerce go on all
the time. One square is twice the size of
Salamanca and surrounded with arcades that
more than 70,000 people pass through every
day, buying and selling."
Admirably sited near the quay of La
Lagunilla, where boats laden with merchan¬
dise tied up, the market was also joined to the
mainland by three causeways.
As the shop window of the Aztec world,Tlatelolco market offered its customers an
amazing variety of exotic products from the
four corners of the empire fruit, animals,
medicines, cloth, hides, pottery, instruments,
tools and materials of all sorts. It also pro
vided many services: public baths, cafés, bar¬
ber shops, porters and slave markets.
Cacao currency
The merchants, known officially as tla-
macaque, were generally also the producers.
Middlemen known as regatonería, who
bought cheap and sold at a profit, did not
appear until the colonial period.
Barter was the normal practice, but some
commodities also served as currency. Cacao
was grown for this purpose in certain parts of
the empire, with the consequence that its
production was strictly controlled by the
government. The basic unit was the bean for
inexpensive items and the sack of 8,000 beans
(xiquipiles) for expensive items.
Handkerchief-sized squares of cotton
known as quachtli were also used as cur¬
rency. They came in three sizes, equalling 65,
80 and 100 cocoa beans respectively. A canoe
was worth a quachtli of 100 beans. A slave
THE UNESCO COURIER« NOVEMBER I906
Irade in Tenochtitlán, capitalof the Aztec empire. Detail
who could sing was worth 30 quachths, and from a mura| pa¡nt¡ng by
an excellent singer and dancer could fetch 40 Die2° Rivera in the Nat'°na'Palace, Mexico City.
quachtlis, or 4,000 cocoa beans.
Gold dust was another form of payment.
It was poured into feather quills, whose value
was based on their length and diameter. Small
change came in the form of small, thin, T-
shaped copper coins, nuggets of gold, copper
or pewter, chips of jade and even the red shell
from a mollusc now known as the spondylus.
These trading activities obeyed well-
established laws and rules, for the market, like
other institutions in pre-Columbian Mexico,
functioned on a "correct and fair" (in qualli,
in yectli) basis. No business could be trans¬
acted outside the market area, where each
merchant was allotted a place corresponding
to the nature of his wares. Lengths of rope
and receptacles of various capacities were
standardized and used to measure quantities.
The price of each article was fixed in advance,
and any merchant caught cheating on mea¬
sures or price was severely punished.
There was a chamber where twelve judges
sat in permanent session to ensure fair deal¬
ing and settle differences. Superintendents
regularly went on rounds to maintain security
and prevent fraud.
When they founded Mexico City, the
Europeans created two new markets but nei¬
ther ever attained the size or the splendour of
Tlatelolco. But Tlatelolco did not survive the
Spanish conquest.
W THE UNESCO ^JURIERl NOVEMBFR 1996
A giganticemporium
"Let us begin with the dealers in gold, silver and precious
stones, feathers, cloaks and embroidered goods, and male
and female slaves Next there were those who sold coarser
cloth, and cotton goods and fabrics made of twisted thread,
and there were chocolate merchants with their chocolate. In
this way you could see every kind of merchandise to be found
anywhere in New Spain, laid out in the same way as goods are
laid out in my own district of Medina del Campo, a centre for
fairs, where each line of stalls has its own particular sort. So
it was in this great market. There were those who sold sisal
cloth and ropes and the sandals they wear on their feet, which
are made from the same plant. All these were kept in one part
of the market, in the place assigned to them, and in another
part were skins of tigers and lions, otters, jackals and deer,
badgers, mountain cats, and other wild animals, some tanned
and some untanned, and other classes of merchandise.
"There were sellers of kidney-beans and sage and other veg¬
etables and herbs in another place, and in yet another they were
selling fowls, and birds with great dewlaps [turkeys], also rab¬
bits, hares, deer, young ducks, little dogs and other such
creatures. Then there were the fruiterers; and the women who
sold cooked food, flour and honey cake, and tripe, had their
part of the market. Then came pottery of all kinds, from big
water-jars to little jugs, displayed in its own place, also honey,
honey-paste and other sweets like nougat. Elsewhere they
sold timber too, boards, cradles, beams, blocks, and benches,
all in a quarter of their own.
"But why waste so many words on the goods in their great
market? If I describe everything in detail I shall never be done.
Paper, which in Mexico they call amal, and some reeds that smell
of liquidambar, and are full of tobacco, and yellow ointments and
other such things, are sold in a separate part. Much cochineal
is for sale too, under the arcades of that market, and there are
many sellers of herbs and other such things
"lam forgetting the sellers of salt and the makers of flint
knives, and how they split them off the stone itself, and the
fisherwomen and the men who sell small cakes made from a
sort of weed which they get out of the great lake, which curdles
and forms a kind of bread which tastes rather like cheese.
They sell axes too, made of bronze and copper and tin, and
gourds and brightly painted wooden jars. . . ."
Bernai Díaz del Castillo
The Conquest of New Spain (1632).
Translated by J. M. Cohen (1963), Penguin Classics, Penguin
Books. Copyright © J.M. Cohen 1963.
Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
ITALY The merchants of Venice
BY DONATELLA CALABI
Ihe Rialto Bridge, originallymade of wood, was rebuilt
several times over the
centuries. In the second half of
the 15th century it had a
drawbridge in the centre to let
sailing boats through. It can
be seen (above) in Vittore
Carpaccio's Miracle of the
Relic of the Cross (1494).
s early as the twelfth centurythere was a flourishing com¬mercial district in the cluster of
i islands divided by a canal which^ wc now call Venice. It devel¬
oped on a site where the land was higher thanelsewhere, affording protection against floods.
Three centuries later, this district the
Rialto had become the financial nerve cen¬
tre of the Venetian Republic. Its tightly
woven urban fabric contained many state
administrative offices. A public clock tolledthe hours of finance and business.
In the night of 10 January 1514 fire swept
through the Rialto, reducing much of it to ashes.
It spread through the wooden warehouses
packed with merchandise and destroyedimmense amounts of public and private trea¬
sure. Rebuilding took almost twenty years.
By the mid-sixteenth century the Rialto
r 17THEUNESCO ^_pURIERB NOVEMBER 1996 H
was a busy dockland area. Trading activities,
business premises, government buildings andbanks were concentrated around the little
church of San Giacomo (reputedly the oldest
in Venice) and its adjacent square.
At the foot of a wooden bridge, the firstto be built across the Grand Canal, were
many offices. Just opposite the public scales,cells awaited those who tried to cheat on their
taxes or flout the property laws. On the Riva
del Vino and the Riva del Ferro (the Wine
and Iron Quays), thronged with barges ladenwith wine, oil, iron, salt and flour, stood the
Land Customs House, the Wine Toll House
and various valuers' offices which, dark and
poky though they were, were well situated to
supervise water-borne traffic.
Not far away was the great flour ware¬
house set up in the thirteenth century and
run by private officials on the state's behalf.
There was a small portico beneath whichsacks of oats and corn were unloaded. The
Ruga degli Orefici (Goldsmiths' Street),
which led to the Rialto bridge, contained jew¬
ellers' shops, as well as drapers' stalls in a long
building known as the Drapperia. Merchants
selling Tuscan cloth were based in the Rialto
Nuovo square behind the Drapperia.
A number of magistrates' offices were
also situated at the foot of the bridge. Beneath
an open portico nobles and merchants trans¬
acted business, and magistrates regulated the
mooring of boats and the sale of merchandise.
189 THE UNESCoQuiRIERB NOVEMBER 1996
iazza San Giacomo di
Rialto in Venice (1730), by the
Venetian painter Antonio
Canal, better known as
Canaletto. A market was held
in the square.
DONATELLA CALABI,
of Italy, is a specialist in urban
history.
The Camerlenghi di Comun, magistrates
responsible for state funds, officiated in an
adjoining building.
The square of San Giacomo was the hub
of the Rialto and the place where international
contracts were negotiated. On the ground
floor of a nearby building were money¬changers and, later, counters where contracts
were drawn up. In the upper storeys vaulted
rooms contained depositaries and the apart¬
ments of public inspectors known as
Provveditori. In one nearby street, lined by
the ironwork gratings of notaries' offices,
were the headquarters of the marine insur¬ance authorities. In another were furriers.
Two more contained shops selling cheese,
basketwork and rope.
On a vast quayside area built on piles overthe Grand Canal were the herb market
(Erbaria), the fruit market (Fruttaria) and
other specialized emporia, and a mooring for
members of the nobility. To spare the neigh¬
bourhood the smell of fish, the Pescharia (the
fish market) was banished from San Giacomo
square. The rest of the Rialto consisted of a
few houses, warehouses and shops, tabernae
where the many foreign merchants received
hospitality and other inns frequented by
prostitutes.A few reminders of the Rialto's historic
importance as a hub of trade between East
and West still survive. The Stagiera pubblica
(public scales) at the foot of the Rialto bridge
and the Pietra del bando (a pink granite col¬
umn where the decrees of the Republic were
read out) on San Giacomo square are stillused.
The architect commissioned to rebuild
the district after the fire of 1514, Antonio
Abbondi, known as Scarpagnino, made the
Rialto a more homogeneous and less con¬
gested district, as we can see in his Old
Buildings (Fabbriche Vecchie), formerly the
headquarters of the superintendants of trade,
navigation and supplies. The trend towards
greater regularity in architecture and town
planning culminated, around the middle of
the sixteenth century, in Jacopo Sansovino's
New Buildings (Fabbriche Nuove), whichfollow the curve of the Grand Canal.
The finishing touch to the integration of
the trading centre into the city was made in1587 when the decision was taken to rebuild
the old wooden bridge in stone.
BRAZIL Open market or closed shop?BY MARIE-FRANCE GARCIA-PARPET
M refinery and workers'dwellings on a sugar
plantation in northeastern
Brazi
n 1938 the owner of Serro-Azul sugar
plantation in Brazil's Pernambuco state
set up a market on his estate. Typical of
many that were established on planta¬
tions in the sugar-producing region of north¬
eastern Brazil, the market came into existence
at a time of large-scale expansion at Serro-Azul
triggered by the introduction of modern
refinery techniques. The resulting changes
made the master, who until then had person¬
ally supervised work in the cane fields, moreremote from the moradores, the labourers
who lived on his estate. Power came to be
exercised by intermediaries, the managers of
the plantation's various domains.
The master set up the market because he
wanted to reproduce on his larger and more
complex plantation the atmosphere of thesmaller world that had been centred on the
old steam mill. The market would be a place
where the people who worked on the plan¬
tation could meet at regular intervals. Like the
church, the cinema and the school, it would
act as a focus for social life.
A site was found for the market in the set¬
tlement which had grown up around the
refinery, which was itself marooned in the
midst of an immense 14,000-hectare expanse
of sugar cane fields. There was no regular
means of transport to the nearest town,
Palmares, 25 kilometres away. The settlement
consisted of the casa grande the master's
imposing residence, the comfortable homes
of the refinery managers and office workers,
THE UNESCO (plJRIERB NOVEMBER 1996 m
and the little shacks in which the workers and
some of the moradores lived (most of the lat¬
ter lived out in the cane fields).
The market was held on Saturday evenings
and Sunday mornings. At first glance it
seemed like a market in any other small town.
The same foodstuffs (fruit, vegetables, meat,
manioc flour, clothes and household linen)
were on sale and it was divided up in lots in
the same way. However, a sharp eye might
have noted that there were no cattle or pack
animals in the market. Stock-rearing was the
privilege of small, independent producers.
The company store
People with goods to sell could come from
outside the estate, but most of them were
from the plantation moradores with pro¬
duce from their plots of bad. refinery work¬ers, women office staff and labourers. Each
vendor was assigned a pitch by the master or
the market superintendent. This arrangement
could be rescinded at any moment, for
whereas in towns the right to set up a market
stall is normally paid for in the form of a
municipal tax, here it was a reward for a loyal
morador, like the grant of a plot of land on
which to grow a few vegetables.
The customers were moradores from nearby
domains, refinery workers and employees'wives. It would never have crossed the minds
of people from outside the plantation to do
91)W THE UNESCoQ)URIERB NOVEMBER 1996
.ayout of the Serro-Azul
refinery
1. Workers' dwellings2. Plots of land
3. Covered market
4. The market square
5. Spare parts warehouse6. Fertilizer shed
7. Dwellings of moradores
(cane cutters)
8. Distillery
9. Factory
10. Sugarcane shed11. Offices
12. Casa Grande (the owner's
house)13. School
14. Church
15. Cinema
16. The manager's house
17. Barracäo (store)
MARIE-FRANCE GARCIA-PARPET
is a French sociologist.
their shopping at Serro-Azul. Prices were not
very competitive with those in town. This was
above all a place where the plantation-owner
could show that he was the boss. All the peo¬ple who lived on the plantation patronized the
Serro-Azul market, but the managerial staff
only went there when they had no time to goto the town.
"We buy at Serro-Azul because we have
to," people said. "There's nothing else we can
do; but it's not a market, it's a barracäo, a com¬
pany store." For both the cane field workers
(the poorest of whom were not even allowed
into the market) and the refinery workers the
market was a symbol of their subjugation. The
plantation managers, who rode through themarket on horseback, talked down from the
saddle to any moradores they wanted to see.
The presence of the master and his family was"natural" because his house was so near.
Unlike farmers from the region, moradores
and workers could only buy and sell during"free" time (granted at the owner's discretion)
from their work on the plantation.
An instrument of control
Traders from outside the estate were hawk¬
ers and small producers who had alreadyworked on the plantation on a seasonal basis.
They owned small plots of land in the sur¬
rounding region, and made ends meet in this
way. The owner was well disposed towards
them because during the harvest they had
lived in the outhouses of the refinery and had
assimilated the rules of the big plantation.
They all knew him and greeted him in the
marketplace.
Officially the market came under the
municipality of Palmares, but it was the plan¬
tation-owner who fixed the time and placefor business and oversaw the distribution of
produce for the barracäo. Meat, dried fish, oiland coffee on sale at the barracäo could not
be sold by outsiders. The market superinten¬dent who collected the stand taxes on behalf
of the municipality was a functionary but he
was also the master's right-hand man.
The master thus controlled every square
inch of the market without needing to be
physically present. By providing an opportu¬
nity to buy goods on the estate, he could
supervise trade and social life on the planta¬
tion, keep tabs on the financial situation of hismoradores, control their relations with the
outside world and restrain alcohol abuse and
fighting. The market tightened his links with
the workers and asserted his power overthem.
The existence of a market on the planta¬
tion did not give the moradores, labourers or
employees an opportunity to achieve auton¬
omy from the landowner. Bringing people
together was a gift to the community in
return for which the community was kept
M arket day on a plantationin northeastern Brazil
Mn abandoned shop on aplantation in northeastern
Brazil.
/
under the owner's vigilant eye. Although
strictly speaking the market was not directly
controlled by the land-owner, it was orga¬
nized so that it corralled the people who lived
on the plantation into an area dominated by
him, narrowed their mental horizons and iso¬
lated them from the world without any need
to draw up formal regulations or even build
a fence around the plantation.
This was how things were until the day
when traditional relationships on the planta¬
tion finally came to an end. In the 1970s,
when we carried out the survey on which
this article is based, the Serro-Azul market
was winding down. Most of the moradores
did their shopping in town, where goods
were cheaper and they could meet all kinds
of people, leave a closed world and haveaccess to a union. The focus of social life had
moved from inside the plantation to outside.
When the flow of exchange (work, med¬
ical aid, protection) between master and
morador ceased to have the trappings of a rec¬
iprocal gift and became a more objective
employer-employee relationship as a result of
unionization, plantation owners gradually
disengaged from their obligations to theirworkers.
The lesson of Serro-Azul is that the con¬
cept of the market does not always go hand inhand with freedom.
© AN rights reserved
IE UNESCO Q)UR1ERB NOVEMBER 1996 21
AFR|CA A tradition of cross-border trade
BY ALIX SERVAIS AFOUDA
ALIX SERVAIS AFOUDA,
of Benin, is an agronomist and
geographer.
I he Lake Chad basin has always
been a hub of long-distance
trade between the Sahara
Desert, the forest regions of the
Gulf of Guinea and the plateau of
Central Africa.
With the creation of nation states in post-
colonial Africa trading activity was concen
trated along interstate borders. Frontier
towns and markets became administrative
centres and the focal points of regional trade.
Merchants settled in these towns but did
not cut off contact with the Hausa, Kanuri,
Fulani, Shewa-Arab and other peoples from
which they came. They belonged to corpo¬
rations that dated back to the days when car¬
avans plied through the region and were gov¬
erned by regulations specific to each ethnic
22 THE UNESCO^HJRIERl NOVEMBER l<>"6
group. They traded mainly in local subsis¬
tence products such as millet, sorghum, rice
and tubers, imported rice, flour and wheat,
cattle, sheep and goats, and products manu¬
factured locally or in other countries.
The transnational nature of their activities
brought the merchants into contact with for¬
eign-exchange dealers, brokers, guides and
transporters as well as officials and other mid¬
dlemen. But the far-reaching ramifications of
their trade, the ambivalent nature of certain
business centres straddling the border between
two states, and the practice of corruption and
smuggling made it possible for merchants to set
up trade circuits that eluded state supervision.
Long-distance
trade
There are two kinds of trading circuit. Locally
grown farm produce is traded within small-
scale networks based on towns and markets
held at regular intervals. This type of trade
may involved people living on cither side of
a state frontier. There are also long-distance
A circuits of transnational trade in locally pro-bove, a caravan y L
transporting salt in Niger. duced or imported agricultural and manufac-
Delow right, a market in tured goods along routes linking Nigeria,
Cameroon, Niger and Chad.
The volume and nature of trade between
these four countries is determined by three
main factors:
I Complementary needs resulting from eco¬
logical differences. Millet, sorghum, tubers and
cola are imported by Niger and Chad from
Nigeria and Cameroon, for example, in exchange
for cattle, hides, leather, fish and natron.
> The economic situation in each country.
Compared with the other Chad basin coun¬
tries, Nigeria is an economic giant. Next in size
comes Cameroon, followed by Niger and
Chad, two landlocked countries of the Sahel
which have few development resources.
Nigeria's economic might is reflected in the
diversity of its industries, its massive output
Chad.
and the fact that over 95 per cent of its export
revenues comes from oil.
I Political differences. These are mainly asso¬
ciated with agricultural policies, the regulation
of foreign trade and the use of two currencies
in the region (the non-convertible Nigerian
Naira, and the CFA franc, whose convert¬
ibility is guaranteed by the Bank of France).
Irrespective of the enormous losses due
to fraud in the different countries, the intensi¬
fication of regional and cross-border trade in
the Chad basin has by and large encouraged
the growth of agriculture, a parallel exchange
market, transport, crafts and services. In farm¬
ing alone, by allowing certain areas to sell off
their crop surpluses and others to reduce their
subsistence crop deficits, this trade has become
a factor in regional food security. The way in
which food security stocks are regulated via
the different trade circuits shows that the
region's economy has remained strongly inte¬
grated in spite of the way in which national
frontiers are drawn.
The Lake Chad basin is a crossroads of
sub-regional trade that supplies the whole of
Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad and
other countries such as the Central African
Republic. Its commercial dynamism is such
that a kind of de facto integration is main¬
tained by local populations irrespective of
what states might wish.
THE UNESCO (oURlERB NOVEMBER 1996 CO
FRANCE Friday in CarpentrasAn ethnologist describes
what happens on market day in a French provincial town
BY MICHELE DE LA PRADELLE
Friday is market day in Carpentras.By seven o'clock in the morningthe centre of this old town in
southeast France, once sur¬
rounded by ramparts and today acomplex of twisting alleyways and pretty lit¬tle squares, is already humming with life assome 350 itinerant traders set up their stalls
and the local tradespeople lay out their wareson the pavement in front of their shops.Motor traffic is forbidden and a throng ofpedestrians is soon pushing its way betweenthe stalls. From amidst a miscellany of food¬stuffs, odours and colours, the hawkers shoutto make themselves heard above the noise of
the crowd.
People do not come to the market atCarpentras for purely economic reasons, sinceits prices and its wares are pretty much the
same as those in the local supermarkets. Theycome to enjoy the atmosphere, stroll aroundand meet other people. The market is a tem¬porary melting-pot for North African immi¬grants from the northern parts of the town,the local bourgeoisie, people from the sur¬rounding countryside and, in summer, passingtourists and Parisians who own houses in the
area. As they walk through the town on mar¬
ket day, people visit neighbourhoods whereperhaps they would never venture otherwise.
For a few hours the market brings togethersocial groups whose members do not nor¬mally communicate because they live in dif¬ferent parts of town and have different waysof life and cultural values. Market traders are
the key players in setting up these encounters.Everything they do is designed to trans¬
form making a sale into an event. It is impos¬sible for a customer to make a quick purchaseand slip unobtrusively away. The trader singsout the order in a loud voice, lauds the qual¬ity of his or her wares, makes nonsense of the
usual customer-trader relationship and sets
I he pig market at Carpentras(1841), a watercolour by DenisBonnet.
MICHELE DE LA PRADELLE
is a French ethnologist.
24 THE UNESCO Q>URIERB NOVEMBERI99Û
" I he market brings togethersocial groups whose members
do not normally
communicate." Above, market
scenes in Carpentras.
the ball rolling for an exchange of views inwhich everyone around the stall is free totake part.
The customers need no prompting to join
in. Standing around the pork butcher's van orthe fishmonger's counter, or just driftingthrough the crowd, you find yourself bump¬ing into all kinds of people and creating "mar¬ket relationships" that are distinct from anyothers in your everyday life, private or pro¬fessional. Any pretext can be used to makecontact and spark off a conversation: a com¬ment about the weather (it's about time we
had some rain), a touch of rheumatism, the
quality of the artichokes, how time flies. . . .In this type of situation, you talk for the
sake of talking, to keep the conversation going.After the opening gambit, you find yourselfmaking pseudo-confidences, treating some¬one you have only known for five minutes asan old friend. You stick to generalizations andkeep quiet about your real situation, which isoften very different from that of the personyou are talking to, and avoid subjects such asyour children's education, your garden, yourhouse and housework.
Local colour
This sociability is the result of a commonsense of belonging to the locality. When yougo to the market in Carpentras, you reaffirmor lay claim to a collective identity. The mar¬ket is one of the town's institutions, and to
buy your mullet or your olives there is a wayof proving to yourself and of showing to oth¬ers that you are a local whether you reallyare or not. If you want to be "somebody" in
France today, you have to be from "some¬where". If you make remarks that show your
familiarity with the market if you ask thebutcher whether he still makes a certain kind
of pate, for example people will regard youas a regular. For Parisians who own propertyin the region, the market is an opportunity tobuild up their stock of local affiliations.
This sociability cannot be divorced fromthe historical background of the market,which has been held in the same place on the
same day for as far back as anyone canremember. The mere fact of buying your
goat cheese and your shoelaces on the Placedu Palais (a residence of the Avignon popes
in the fourteenth century) has symbolicovertones. But it must be admitted that the
traditional character of Carpentras market
today is in some ways more apparent thanreal. A market of travelling stallholders likethis one is full of reminders of a world that has
disappeared. If you are not careful, the soil onthe potatoes and the green sprigs sproutingfrom the carrots might make you think the
hawker picked them only a few hours ago, atdawn in his garden.
A taste of time gone by
The municipal authorities, as well as the cus¬tomers and the hawkers, also try to recreate
the atmosphere of the market as it was in daysgone by. The wares are grouped together bycategories, as they were when the market wasalso a wholesale market divided into a corn
market, a garlic market, a mulberry leaf mar¬ket and other small trading posts where the
region's craft and farm produce were sold.The only surviving trace of this old
arrangement is the truffle market, the biggestin France. It is attended by truffle brokers andpreservers and by "rabassiers" local peoplewho look for truffles in their spare time withtheir dogs in the hills around Carpentras. It is
a kind of secret ceremony, an unobtrusive
sideshow to the main market, but it gives
Carpentras market its touch of authenticity.For a few hours a week at least, the citi¬
zens of Carpentras enjoy feeling that they are
shopping at a typical market of old Provence.In the name of a shared identity, and under
the cover of anonymity they can practise a
generalized friendship which is both joyfuland feigned and has something in common
with philia the friendly spirit whichAristotle regarded as an essential component
of a political community.
r 25THE UNESCO (^URIERB NOVEMBER 1996
A puzzling transitionRussian public opinion has mixed feelings
about economic reform
BY YURI LEVADA
Michael Lynch © Stock Illustration Source, Pans
YURI LEVADA
is a Russian economist and
sociologist.
fter the collapse of the planned
economy in the Soviet Union,reforms carried out in a diffi-
L cult economic environment
got a mixed reception from the
population. Many feared economic disaster
and a massive explosion of popular discon¬
tent. Surveys have shown that anxiety about
the future among the population peaked atthe beginning of 1992.
At the same time many were deluded into
believing that privatization of the economy
could be easily achieved and could enable the
country to develop rapidly. Most inhabitantsof the Soviet Union had no idea how market
mechanisms and financial structures actually
worked, how to exercise the right to prop¬
erty, how to accumulate capital or how to
save. Moreover, the political situation and the
balance of power within the regime made it
impossible to carry out reforms as planned.
Changes were made too slowly and chaoti¬
cally, so that they hurt the majority of the
population. It took several years before the
early enthusiasms and disappointments
sparked by the market economy gave way to
a more clear-sighted appraisal and a determi¬nation to adjust to new conditions.
Over the last few years public opinion has
been divided as to the need to pursue eco¬
nomic reforms leading to a market economy.
As the table on page 28 shows, almost half the
population has no opinion as to whether or not
the reforms should be pursued. The chief sup¬
porters of the reforms are the youngest and
most educated strata of society living in the
cities. These are people to whom the years of
reform have given greater opportunities to usetheir own initiative, and who have remained
extremely confident about future changes.
The most resolute opponents of continued
reforms are the over- fifty-fives, retired peo¬
ple and villagers, in other words those who
have lost more than they have gained from the
transition to a market economy.
The wealthiest, and especially the new self-
styled "businessmen" and "managers", natu¬
rally welcome the market economy. Of those
in the highest income bracket, 48 per cent are
in favour of continued reforms and 17 per centagainst, while a mere 20 per cent of those in
low-income groups are in favour and 35 per
cent are against. However, the great majority
of those who have received a university or
specialized education want to see reforms
continue, even though many of them have
experienced a fall in their standard of living
since the beginning of the reforms because of
26THE UNESCO lOURIER« NOVEMBER 190<j
the crisis in higher education, science and
industrial research. Despite that, they remainhopeful that the reforms will succeed.
How fair is privatization?
To judge from data provided by a series ofpublic opinion polls carried out in 1995, 42
per cent of the population regard an eco¬nomic system based on state planning and
distribution as "fairer", while 37 per cent arein favour of a system based on private prop¬erty and market forces. The rest are don't-
knows. (Some 9,600 people were polled.) The
opinion of elderly people tips the balance in
favour of a planned system.Today 26 per cent of Russians believe that
most of their fellow citizens have alreadyadjusted to the changes that have taken place,
29 per cent think they will be able to adjust
in the near future, and 32 per cent consider
that they will never be able to do so. The
remaining 13 per cent gave no definite
answer. It is above all the younger, better
educated and most active people who are
prepared to adjust to the new conditions.Those who find it hardest to adjust to the
changes are people who have difficulty inaltering their customary way of life. They con
sist mainly of people living in Russian villagesand small towns, who account for almost two-
thirds of the population. The modernization of
the farming sector entails massive investment
that no one is in a position to make at present.
So reforms aimed at steering that sector
towards a market economy have run into con¬
siderable difficulty and have led to incompre¬
hension and even opposition on the part of
much of the rural population. This is why pri¬
vate land ownership, to which democrats and
reformers are seeking to give legal status, has
the support of city-dwellers but is opposed by
most of the rural population.
Most of the population currently regard
privatization of companies, banks and other
activities as quite normal. Prejudice against
wealthy landowners is far less widespread
than it was a few years ago. Most people nev¬
ertheless feel that the biggest companies and
the energy monopoly should remain in the
hands of the state. The greatest resentment is
directed at the right of foreigners to own land
and large companies. Many still fear that for¬
eign capitalists want to appropriate the coun¬
try's wealth.
It is true that the Russian people's relation¬
ship with the market economy goes further
Ftreet vendors in Moscow.
5 f^URIITHE UNESCO lOURIERB NOVEMBER 109627
f- * ithan the subjective opinions and attitudes ^^^^nE!EE!E93IïIEQSBïE3]H^^^^B ^^ ' ^ \ ^revealed by many public opinion polls. All >(|^(U!UiuUUlïJiyUèiilaIâ!i!M!aUl^^^^M v%_
, , .1 u . March 92 March 93 April 94 March 95 March 96those who are experiencing this on-going but
very real transition towards a new economic For continuing. . ii- AC A reforms 47 42 32 27 31 V
situation are constantly having to denne and
appraise their position. Let us look at some of. . r r , . ... Against continuing
the main features ot this complex situation. reforms 27 20 28 30 26 mz.
WCoping with transition Dont know 26 38 40 43 44
In Russia, about one-third of the working Lpopulation are currently employed by the
private sector, and one-sixth by state-owned most serious problems are considered to bejoint-stock companies. But even the 50 per phenomena resulting from the "transition tocent of the working population employed by the market economy", such as price rises (68public bodies and enterprises already live per cent); cr¡mc (59 pcr cent)5 unemploy-largely in a market economy environment mcnt (55 per ccnt) antj falling production (55and have to take account of its rules. per cent). Some 60 per cent of the population
The market economy has almost every- feel that the quality of life is not now as highwhere put an end to the shortage of con- as it was five years ago.sumer goods that was the inevitable charac- The borders of present-day Russia haveteristic of the planned distribution system. opened up to the circulation of people, goods,The lack of staple commodities came top of information and (to a much lesser degree) cap-the list of problems that most worried the ital. The situation may be full of contradictions,
population at the beginning of the 1990s, but it marks an important stage in the transition
whereas today only a small percentage of of the Russian economy and society towards
people (7 per cent of 2,400 interviewees in a market economy. Most Russians are in
May 1996) mention such shortages, which favour of these new opportunities, and 10 pernow come near the bottom of the list of what cent of them take advantage of their freedom
are regarded as acute problems. Today, the to go on business trips or holidays outside theborders of the former Soviet Union. At the
same time, public opinion closely follows theconstant debate in the mass media about the
negative aspects of contact with the outside
world, such as the flight of capital, the increas¬
ing importance of consumer goods, the inter¬
nationalization of organized crime, and civil
service corruption.
Most voters who took part in this year's
presidential elections and supported the win¬
ning candidate, Boris Yeltsin, came out in
favour of retaining the achievements of the
reforms and against a return to the past.
Almost 80 per cent of those who voted for
Yeltsin believe that the majority of the popu¬
lation has already adjusted, or will adjust in the
very near future, to the reforms, and only 13
per cent think that this will not happen.Conversely, only 35 per cent of those whovoted for the unsuccessful communist candi¬
date think that people will adjust to the
changes, while 49 per cent of them believe it to
be impossible. For the time being, then, reac¬
tions to the reforms remain very clear-cut
across the spectrum of society as a whole.
Ihe GUM shopping arcade in Moscow.
. «
ESAr
In Kagoshima,southwestern Japan,
employees of a
ceramics factory
perform gymnastics at
the weekly staff
meeting.
28 THE UNESCO COURIER! NOVEMBER 199a
» <»
JAPAN
BY HIROSHI OKUMURA
Company capitalism
Has Japan's market economy reached a turning point?
Companies are the key players in
Japan's market economy and are
regarded as legal entities in their
own right. The main share-hold¬
ers in large businesses are not
individuals but interdependent companies
with cross-holdings in each other. I call thissystem "company capitalism".
Individuals, companies and the state are
the three main components of a market econ¬
omy. A study of this market calls for analysisof the relations between companies and indi¬
viduals, between companies themselves, and
between companies and the state. One feature
ofJapanese company capitalism is that the vol¬ume of trade between companies is far greater
than that between companies and individuals,
or between companies and the state. This is
one of the characteristics of Japanese com¬
pany capitalism. Furthermore, private enter¬
prise is by far the largest source of the nation's
wealth. Businesses have a massive superiority
over individuals, which they dominate or« 1 »
envelop .
On the market for manufactured goods,which is dominated, as in the United States
and Europe, by an oligopoly of large corpo¬
rations, prices, quality and services areimposed by companies on individuals onwhat is clearly not an equal footing.
Many products (notably in the automobileand electrical goods sectors) are distributed
according to the keiretsu system (keiretsu are
vertically integrated groups of companies).
THE UNESCO ÏOURIERB NOVEMBER 199629
Manufacturers form keiretsu with whole¬
salers and retailers. They give orders and try
to fix prices. The big retailers such as super¬
markets compete with this form of distribu¬
tion by selling at rock-bottom prices, but
they keep well in with the manufacturers allthe same.
The primacy of the company over the indi¬vidual is most apparent on the job market. The
distinctive features of Japanese management
are "a job for life, wages based on length of ser¬
vice, and company unions", but since relationsbetween businesses and individuals are not on
an equal footing, the job-for-life system means
that the individual is absorbed by the com¬pany. Take the question of recruitment. On
April 1st each year, all companies hire new
graduates at the same time, going on to give
them in-house training and teach them the
company culture. Each recruit is given a post
and then moves around within the company
according to its staffing rota. Recruits get "a
company" rather than "a job". In this contextthe market mechanism does not function and
the job market is non-existent. The companycalls the tune.
In theory the unions act as a counterweight
to the company, but Japanese unions are orga¬
nized within companies, and not grouped by
trades or branches. In other words they are
not a strong force of opposition, and in fact,
companies use unions to implement their
staffing and other policies. The basic principleof company capitalism is that the company
comes first. The staff is a hundred per cent
loyal to the company, and even business chiefs
outside the company but associated with it areunder its control. IVIanagers of affiliates meet
at their parent company's
Kyoto Headquarters.
Direct transactions are the most common
form of trade between businesses. A com¬
pany chooses a business partner from among
a mass of potential partners, and then trading
conditions are decided on. This system pro¬
duces latent competition between businesses,but it cannot be said that the market mecha¬
nism functions fully in it.
Big businessand the banks
In order to choose their partners in these
direct transactions, companies join up in asso¬
ciations of two main kinds: keiretsu (groups
of affiliated companies) and conglomerates
(large industrial groups). Conglomerates are
large corporations linked horizontally, each
one having many affiliated companies. The
companies within each conglomerate are
interdependent via cross-holdings. A club of
the managing directors of the main compa¬
nies meets regularly. Business between the
companies within the conglomerates is co¬
ordinated by sogo shosha (trading companies),
which play a pivotal role.Whereas trade within the keiretsu results
from a unilateral decision by the parent com¬
pany, in the industrial conglomerates it is car¬
ried out between big companies on a recipro¬
cal basis. This system does not totally exclude
outsiders nor apply to all transactions, but thefact remains that the mechanism of the market
economy as described in neoclassical eco¬
nomic theory does not function here."A business without a lead bank does not
exist," they say in Japan. As a rule, this bank
is the main provider of capital for its business
partners, for which it is responsible. If the lat¬
ter go bankrupt, the bank accepts responsi¬
bility for their debts and acquires the bonds it
has issued. It is also a major shareholder inthese businesses, which have shares in the
bank. So this is a system of cross-holdings.
For the keiretsu, the conglomerates andthe lead banks, share ownership is the best
way of bringing companies together. In Japan,
banks and finance companies own almost 70
per cent of the shares in all companies quotedon the stock market. Share ownership is lim¬
ited by an anti-trust law, however. The banks
are not entitled to hold more than 5 per cent
of the shares issued by a company.Companies hold shares in each other in
order to exercise mutual control and create the
conditions for long-term trading between
I rW THE UNESCO {_OURIER NOVEMBER WÙ
them ("compulsory" trading which flies in the
face of the principles of the market economy).But this is also a way of preventing take-oversthrough share purchases by outside compa¬
nies. After the liberalization of capital move¬ments in the 1960s, big Japanese companies
organized large-scale stability operations by
their shareholders in order to prevent foreigncapital from taking over their companies.
Business
and the state
These operations had some harmful effects
on the health of companies and particularlymade it more difficult to restructure them.
The banks and the big companies were over¬
come by a fever of speculation in shares and
land. A monetary "bubble" appeared and
grew until it burst in the early 1990s when
there was a sudden collapse in share and land
prices. The decline of Japanese company cap¬italism had begun.
Japan is said to be ruled by a troika com-
" Japan is said to be ruled by, .. . , u i i i m a troika comprising the
prising the political world, the higher civil ser- poIitica, worldi the higher civi,vice and the financial world. In this context, service and the financial
the financial world means the grouping of big
business leaders, who dominate the economyand are linked to the state, which has made
possible the strong growth of the Japaneseeconomy by giving priority to business and
setting up many aid and protection policies.
This policy to encourage the development
of private enterprise in the finance, services
and other sectors has often been imple¬mented via administrative directives, inde¬
pendent of legislation, and this has given
Japanese bureaucrats far-reaching powers.
The troika system has led to financial support
being given to a political party and to appoint¬
ments for top civil servants in the private sec¬
tor, where they embark on a second career.These links have led to collusion between
politicians, higher civil servants and business,
which has given rise to scandals and corrup¬
tion (and is, in principle, alien to the mecha¬
nism of a market economy).
r 31the Unesco Courier» novemberi99ó ^i
Compared to countries with a socialisttradition such as the Soviet Union and China,
and to the countries of Western Europe, theeconomic clout of nationalized industries in
Japan is relatively light and the state sector is
less important. In this respect the Japaneseeconomy is a market economy and not a
planned economy. It could, however, be
described as a market economy directed bythe state since private business is so closelytied to the state.
A turning point
In addition to these internal contradictions are
the problems raised by the direct investment
made by Japanese companies abroad inAmerica, Europe and Asia in the 1970s and
1980s. Japan's trade surplus with the United
States has also become a major political prob¬lem, and there have been many cases of fric¬tion between Japan and the United States in
the field of co-operation on Japanese-American structural problems.
Company capitalism is showing its limits.Where relations between business and indi¬
viduals on the market for manufactured goodsare concerned, oligopolistic domination is
becoming hard pressed, notably because of theincreasing amount of goods imported fromabroad. As far as the labour market is con-
ndividualism, an unusual
phenomenon for Japan, may
emerge in relations between
businesses and people and
replace the principle of
company supremacy."
HIROSHIOKUMURA
isa Japanese economist.
cerned, the job-for-life system and Japanese-style recruitment are starting to lose ground.
The unions are still company unions and they
continue to give priority to the company, buttheir members are less and less interested and
the rate of unionization is going down.
In relations between companies, it can be
seen that the justification for keiretsu is gettingweaker and that companies are starting to leave
them. The need for conglomerates is also start¬
ing to weaken now that industrial structures are
moving away from the model of heavy indus¬
try and the chemical industry. Even the cross-
holding system is becoming less widespread.The institution of the lead bank is also run¬
ning out of steam. Since the 1980s, the busi¬
ness finance system has diversified. Cross-
holding by companies is starting to be a
handicap for industrialists, and some compa¬nies are selling their shares to generate profit.
With regard to relations between the state
and business, deregulation has been a major
government trend in the 1990s. After the
appearance of splits in the structure of the
politics-civil service-finance troika (politicalscandals, end of single-party domination), it
became increasingly difficult to preserve thecontrol system which these three entities
exercised by mutual support.
How will the Japanese-style market econ¬
omy develop? Towards an "Anglo-Saxon"type of market economy or towards some¬
thing entirely new? I would be inclined to saythat the twenty-first century will not be an age
of big companies or of joint stock companies.Companies will not disappear as such. They
will still even be the mainspring of the econ¬omy. But because industrial structures will be
increasingly different from those of heavy
industry and the chemical industry, big com¬panies involved in mass production will loseground to small and medium-sized businesses
headed by industrialists of a different kind. I
see them as being efficiently interlinked bynetworks and not by the keiretsu and con¬
glomerate system.
Individualism, an unusual phenomenonfor Japan, will emerge in relations between
businesses and people and replace the princi¬
ple of company supremacy. A co-operativestructure or perhaps some radically different
system may take the place of joint stock com¬
panies. These companies will not disappear,but maybe they will have to coexist with
many other forms of business.
d(oiTHE UNESCO lOURIER« NOVEMBER 10%
Market
globalization
BY MARIE-FRANCE BAUD
-
Phil Huling © Stock Illustration Source, Pans
The major economic phenomenon of recent years, globalization is benefitting the
strong countries and bypassing the weak
MARIE-FRANCE BAUD
is a French economic journalist.
The phenomenon known as the
globalization of the economy,which tended to be overlooked
during the high-growth years andthe second half of the 1980s, is now
a front-page issue. It is not, however, a recent
development. In response to imperatives of
size and competitiveness, firms from many
countries have long been establishing them¬
selves in areas of the world with strong eco¬
nomic growth. They go wherever they can
improve productivity. Their growth strategy
has been helped by financial globalization (the
free circulation of capital and the lifting of
exchange controls).
This dctermination'to conquer new mar¬
kets by setting up directly in the countriesconcerned has of course accelerated the
break-up of the production system. Trade in
manufactured goods has increased at the
expense of primary agricultural, mining and
energy products. As a proportion of overall
trade, it went up from 50 per cent in 1970 to
70 per cent in the early 1990s, according to a
European Community survey of May 1993.
Direct foreign investment has also
increased sharply, though it is confined to the
world's three most developed regions North
America, Europe, and Southeast Asia and
Japan. Markets are tending to become inte¬
grated within rather than between regions. In
1993, for example, Japanese industry invested
$65 billion in Southeast Asia (its main area of
investment), more than the figure for the
United States and Europe combined. Markets
are increasingly open, however. In 1995, the
United States was the main beneficiary of direct
French foreign investment flows.
This rise in the volume of direct foreign
investment has forced industrial groups in the
developed countries to rely increasingly on inter¬
national supplies. These groups are now restru c-
turing their activities on a global scale, upsetting
the competitive environment and the organiza¬
tion of skilled labour by repositioning and relo¬
cating operations in low-wage countries. A
THEUNESCO (^URIERB NOVEMBER1996 ^
Of the $23 trillion of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 1993, $18 trillion wasin the industrialized countries, and only $5 trillion in the developing countries, even thoughthey have nearly 80 per cent of the world's population.
In the past 30 years the poorest 20 per cent of the world's people saw their shareof global income decline from 2.3 per cent to 1.4 per cent. Meanwhile, the share of the rich¬
est 20 per cent rose from 70 per cent to 85 per cent. In other words, the ratio of the shares
of the richest and poorest doubledfrom 30/1 to 61/1; the proportion of people enjoy¬
ing per capita income growth of at least 5 per cent a year more than doubled (from 12 to
27 percent), while the proportion of those experiencing negative growth more than tripled
(from 5 per cent to 18 per cent).
The assets of the world's 358 individual dollar billionaires exceed the
combined annual incomes of countries with 45 per cent of the world's people.
Source: Human Development Report 1996, UNDP.
growing amount of international trade in inter¬
mediate goods is apparently between compa¬
nies belonging to the same multinational groups.
Trade within the same group is believed to
amount to 25 per cent of world trade.
Globalization and
pauperization
Economic globalization was on the agenda of
the G7 summit of leading industrialized coun¬
tries held in Lyons, France, in June 1996. While
it is beneficial to world trade, it is also having
negative repercussions on social cohesion and
the equilibrium of the monetary and financial
system. Evidence of this is to be found in the
figure of 19 million unemployed in Europe,where growth is stagnating at below 1 per cent,
and in the upheavals triggered by the Mexican
crisis during the winter of 1994-1995.
According to the 1996 Human Develop¬
ment Report produced by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), average
incomes fell in 70 countries during the 1980s.
During the 1990-1993 period alone, average
incomes fell by a fifth or more in 2 1 countries,
mainly in Eastern Europe and the Common¬
wealth of Independent States (CIS).
Globalization benefits the strong coun¬
tries and puts the weakest at a disadvantage:
"The poorest countries, where 20 per cent of
the world's population lives, have seen theirshare of world trade fall between 1960 and
1990 from 4 per cent to less than 1 per cent,"
notes the UNDP report. "Although private
investment flows to developing countriesincreased between 1970 and 1994 from $5 bil-
W THE UNESCO Q>URIER1 NOVEMBERI<W6
everish activity on the
Mexico City stock exchange on
5 January 1995, when Mexico
was mired in financial crisis.
lion to $173 billion, three-quarters of this
went to just ten countries, mostly in East andSoutheast Asia and Latin America."
Yet in 1995 the World Bank forecast that
the expansion of international trade and finan¬
cial markets would encourage sustainable
economic growth, and that this growth
would contribute to a considerable improve¬
ment in living conditions in developing coun¬
tries, which, according to these projections,
arc expected to account for 38 per cent of
world production by 2010, as compared with
22 per cent in the 1980s. The developingcountries would in that case account for half
of world consumption and capital formation
in terms of the quantity of goods and services
that can be bought.
Relocation and
unemployment
Many developed countries have realized that itis in their interest to internationalize the manu¬
facturing process. As a result they are relocating
their industrial production so as to take advantage
of low wage costs and to move closer to the
sources of raw materials and primary products.
Does this mean that relocation is respon¬
sible for the unemployment that has hit the
majority of developed countries? Some
authorities, including Charles Oman, who
heads a working group on these problems at
the Organization for Economic Co-opera¬tion and Development (OECD), believe that
underemployment is more likely to be due to
the difficulty inherent in moving from a
heavyweight process of industrial production
to more flexible and productive methods
enhanced by new technologies in other
words, in leaving the era of mechanization
and entering the era of automatization.
Some economists argue that what is reallyat stake in the relocation process is not so
much the ability to withstand competition
from low-wage countries as the ability to cap¬ture market share in sophisticated products
and leading-edge technologies. According tothat argument, the real problems have been
masked by lumping together the axing of jobs
and the redeployment of production.
The Washington accords
Under a system of fixed exchange rates,
exchange mechanisms play only a secondaryrole. The development of international rela¬
tions and the general liberalization of capitalmovements have ushered in a new mecha¬
nism in exchange rate formation. Since the
Washington accords of December 1971,
which caused the collapse of the international
monetary system established at Bretton
Woods in 1944 (under which each currency
had a fixed parity expressed in gold), most
states have stopped setting the official value
of their currency. The observed or antici¬
pated evolution of rates is far more influential
than the value of the currency.One last unwelcome effect that financial
globalization and deregulation have had is to
introduce a considerable element of fragility
into the world economy. Macroeconomic
trends seem to be influenced more by the
opinion of the market than by political deci¬
sions for which governments arc accountableto their voters. Worse, financial reactions can
degenerate into cumulative trends, whether
downward or upward, and as a result send
prices spiralling into regions that bear no rela¬
tion to basic economic facts, since markets are
incapable of self-regulation. Every twenty-fourhours, more than a trillion dollars move around
the world seeking the highest yield. This flow
of capital "has opened the world to the opera¬
tion of a global financial market that leaves even
the strongest countries with limited autonomy
over interest rates, exchange rates or other
financial policies," UNDP reports.
This rampant globalization is generating
inharmonious economic development which
is causing mounting pauperization instead of
Rhodn Jones © Panos Pictures, London
creating jobs. Each year the ranks of the
world's poor swell by 25 million. Differences
in economic performance have grown so
huge that two distinct worlds have come into
being, with the gulf between rich and poor
growing continually.
At the close of this year's G7 summit, the
seven leading industrialized countries called for
a new world partnership for development that
would include developing countries, developedcountries and multilateral institutions, so that the
poorer countries can pro fit from globalization.
Were the political decision-makers just con¬
cerned to make the right noises, or have they at
last realized the necessity of such a step ?
M window display of Westerngoods in a shop in Kunming,
capital of Yunnan Province in
southern China.
THE UNESCO (¿URI ERI NOVEMBER 190635
THE RISE OF THE STOCK MARKET
BY EMMANUEL VAILLANT
Paolo Koch © Rapho, Paris
Ihe New York Stock Exchange
EMMANUEL VAILLANT
is a French journalist.
Stock exchanges, also known, as
bourses, came into 'being in Europe in
the middle of the sixteenth century
I when, in conjunction with markets and
trade fairs, places were created for
transactions involving letters of credit and shares in
trading companies. The term "bourse" is thought to
have been first used in 1549 in Bruges (in present-day
Belgium) and to be derived from the Van der Bürse fam¬
ily, whose town house was used by dealers trading in
real-estate securities.
Until the late nineteenth century, Bruges, Antwerp,
Lyons, Amsterdam, Paris and London were succes¬
sively the leading financial markets. Their role at the
heart of the capitalist system was to provide a meet¬
ing place between savers (private individuals and
banks) and investors (states and businesses).
There are two main kinds of securities, shares and
bonds. Shares represent a portion of a company's
capital and offer a return (dividends) that varies in
accordance with the company's profits. Bonds, on the
other hand, are securities issued for a certain period
of time, guaranteeing fixed interest earnings for their
holders. Prices go up or down in accordance with sup¬
ply and demand and are subject to speculation.
In the twentieth century the world's stock
exchanges have made an important contribution to the
financing of national economies. New York's Wall Street
(U.S.A.) is the leading financial market today, in com¬
petition with the stock exchanges of Asia (especially
Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore) and Europe
(Frankfurt, London and Paris). On these increasingly
globalized financial markets, which are developing more
and more complex products, the trade in securities is
influenced by economic, monetary, political and psy¬
chological factors.
These markets are sometimes criticized as func¬
tioning like a "financial bubble", generating purely spec¬
ulative profits which are unrelated to the development
of the so-called "real" economy, i.e. industry, trade and
services.
36E UNESCO Q>OURIERB NOVEMBER! 996
Changes in real trade/GDP, 1960-1994 ¿rjrjr%
1.5
1.2
0.9
0.6
0.3
0.0
World High-income Low and middlecountries Income
countries
East Asia Europe andCentral Asia
South Asia
1*
Middle East
and North
Africa
Sub-
Saharan
Africa
Share of merchandise imports from developing countries, 1994
%
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
United
StatesEuropean
Union
Japan Industrial Developing
Direction of merchandise exports, 1994
Developing countries to Industrial countries (19%)
Industrial countries to developing countries (19%)
Developing countries to developing countries (14%)
%
10
Average annual growth of imports,1981-1993
%
15
Average annual growth of exports,1981-1993
World
High- East Asiaincome and
countries Pacific
South Latin
Asia America
and the Central
Caribbean Asia
Europe Middle Sub-and East and Saharan
North Africa
Africa
High- East Asia South Latin Europe Middle Sub- i
Income and Asia America and East and Saharan |countries Pacific and the Central North Africa a
Caribbean Asia Africa y
THEUNESCO lOURIER« NOVEMBER IWG37
commentary Federico Mayo
loetry, an educationin freedom
It is impossible to he indifferent to the situation of operain the world today. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, this art form which blends in a sublime
alchemy the human voice, instrumental music and
visual effects enchanted the courts and theatres of
England, Germany, Spain and France. The great oper¬atic works of the last four centuries were moments of
perfection in the story of musical creation. Down
through the ages, Monteverdi, Lully, Scarlatti, Handel,
Rameau, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi,
Berlioz, Bizet and Glinka absorbed the heritage of the
past and went on to break new ground. Whatever the
dramatic subject matter, whatever the form, theybrought creative magic to it.
Cassandras predicted that opera would die in the
twentieth century, and it is true that for more than half
a century cinema and television have replaced opera as
a leading source of popular entertainment. Opera is
prohibitively expensive to produce and is dependent on
public or private sponsorship, yet it remains the dream-
medium for most contemporary composers and still has
a public following. I observed this recently in the arena
of Verona in Italy with a production of Bizet's Carmen,
directed by the master Franco Zeffirelli and conducted
by Daniel Oren.
It is impossible, too, not to think of the great voices
that over the past forty years have brought new authen¬
ticity and grandeur to opera. Audiences marvel at the
purity of their timbre, their elegance of phrasing and
their perfect sense of style. I think especially of
Monserrat Caballé, Placido Domingo, BarbaraHendricks and José Carreras, who have done me the
honour of joining UNESCO's group of Goodwill
Ambassadors. They defend the ideals of UNESCO, espe¬cially in the context of exchanges between cultures, in
training young people and encouraging their involve-
THE UNESCO^>URlER« NOVEMBER199Ô
My totem ¡s peace (1971), a painting by Algerian artist
Mohammed Khadda (1930-1991).
ment in creative activities. They also support a project
to which I am particularly attached and which I dis¬
cussed at length with the Verona authorities: the cre¬
ation of an international institute for opera and poetry.
The future Institute will be a place to meet and
exchange ideas, to discuss current developments in
opera, its future, its response to new technology, and
the training of young people. Leading experts will be
able to contribute a spirit of scientific rigour and a mass
of specialized data and knowledge. It hardly needs to
be said that special attention will be paid to the tradi¬
tions of non-European opera, whether from Beijing,
Java or Bali.
The Institute's other component will be devoted to
the world of poetry. Whatever official functions I
occupy in my working life, in the silence of the evening
and morning I always return to poetry. I can only live
and I wish only to live in the space and freedom of
poetry. Poetry is an education in freedom. Despite the
barriers and the inequalities that continue to exist in the
world (and I see them at first hand when traveling for
UNESCO), it is writers, poets, novelists and thinkers who
do most to change ways of thinking, banish taboos and
undermine prejudices. Fanned to a white heat, words
have the power to melt chains. Sometimes the word is
all powerful.
All my thoughts are linked to a culture of peace,
which I think brings me close to the original flame of
UNESCO, to the soul of this intellectual and moral arm
of the United Nations system. It is my belief that poetry
brings its pure grist to the mill of an ethical system that
must be rethought. Is it futile to dream of a different
kind of society, one capable of engendering a new
humanity and perpetuating harmonious human rela¬
tionships? Is it mad to want to put an end to a lethally
destructive practice (war) and reinvent another prac¬
tice (peace) that takes experience into account? The
poetry I love is not an empty game. It is an inner link
between poetics, ethics and politics.
History the history of humanity and the history of
language is an unending process. The poet must be a
catalyst in the renewal of active thinking and the values
that are an honour to our species and urge us constantly
to exceed our own self-expectations. Poetry is a bulwark
against the onslaught of barbarity in its many guises: ide¬
ological and technological aberrations, violence, nation¬
alism, religious and political fanaticism, racism, intoler¬
ance and selfishness. Why appeal to poetry, timeless,
immaterial and weaponless that it is? The answer is that
in poetry the word is brought to an incandescent heat
and speaks to each and every one of us. It pulverizes
injustice and hatred; it is akin to love. Yes, poetry is an
Ark of the Covenant, our Ark of the Covenant. For all
of us, poet and reader alike, poetry can make sense of
the world, with all its obscure mysteries, great contra¬
dictions and sublime achievements. I
"The dream within me
I shall keep
as long as I hreathe.
This dream
is my life,
a dream of love
alive at last
in each one of us1."
1 Federico Mayor, Patterns,
translated l>y Rosemary Wiltshire, 1-orcst Hooks, London, 199 1-.
THE UNESCO (oilRlERB NOVEMBER IW6 V
Greenwatch
lawaii
Volcanoes
National Park-
by France Bequette
Once upon a time Pele the fire god¬dess, daughter of Moe-moea-au-liithe troublemaker and Haumea the
Earth-mother, was travelling insearch of a place to settle. She triedeach of the Hawaiian Islands, one
after the other, hut whenever she
sank her magic spade into the earth
to dig a fire pit, she was too close tothe sea and the waves came and
extinguished the flames. Then, at
long last, she found her dream homeon Kilauea volcano in the southeast
corner of the Island of Hawaii, some¬
times called the Big Island.Native Hawaiians are attached to
their traditions, and still offer their
goddess meat, fish, fruit and flowers,
which they lay on the edge of
Ilalemaumau crater, a sacred place intheir island chain. This sanctuary islocated inside Hawaii Volcanoes
National Park, which was created bya decree of the U.S. Congress in 1961
The Hawaiian Goose or nene (Brantasandvicensis).
Ä*3
W THE UNESCoQiURIERB NOVEMBER l<396
A river of lava oozes from Kilauea, anactive volcano on the Island of Hawaii.
and in 1980 became a UNESCO bios¬
phere reserve1. The Park's status
does not prevent the local peoplefrom practising their traditions there.
Native Hawaiians who regularly go
there do not have to pay the $5entrance fee, they can pick the med¬
icinal plants they need, and the
women are allowed to purify them¬
selves in the hot springs.
The Garden of Eden
About two million people visit the
Park each year. There are excellent
facilities for welcoming them.Exhibitions and film projections are
held at a large Visitor Centre which
also contains a mass of documentary
material and proposes theme-related
guided tours. A network of asphaltedroads enables tourists to skirt the
edge of Kilauea or travel down to the
I. And V. Krafft © Hoa Qui, Pans
sea. The diversity of landscapes isamazing, and trails for walkers fanout in all directions. As the sun beats
down, you pass by smoking, silver-grey era ters , orange banks of sulphur,and mineral deserts and luxuriant
forests where towering ferns mingle
with the dark foliage of the trees.
Visitors can climb 4,1 70-metre-high
Mauna Loa (the "Great Mountain")
that has been built up by a succes¬
sion of lava flows and whose perfectlyrounded summit is sometimes cov¬
ered in snow.
This remote Pacific archipelagoof 124 islands, islets and atolls,
including eight main islands, emerged
from the ocean 70 million years ago
but it was not until 1,600 years agothat its first human inhabitants
Polynesians from the MarquesasIslands arrived. The new settlers
found plants and insects that had
been carried to the islands by the
wind, birds or sea, but no predatoryland mammals. This was a decisive
factor, for in the absence of preda¬tors, neither j liants nor animals devel¬
oped unnecessary systems of defence.
Before mosquitoes came to the
islands as clandestine passengers onthe first sailing ships, the small birdcalled the red apapane (Ilimatione
sanguínea) had developed no immu¬
nity to malaria. Avian malaria now
takes its toll. Mint and sage had noneed of strong, protective odours
before the introduction of goats.
Park officials are doing their bestto save the the state bird, the nene
or Hawaiian goose (Branta sandvi-
censis), from extinction. American
zoologist Stuart Pimm calculates
that at least 101 bird species havedisappeared from Hawaii sincehumans settled there.
Internal enemies
Hawaii's isolation explains why theislands are home to an extraordinar¬
ily large number of endemic plants:
95 per cent of some 1,000 recorded
species are found nowhere else in
the world, but they are vulnerable to
feral pigs (Sus scrofa) and other
browsing animals. According tobotanist Charles Lamoureux, direc¬
tor of Honolulu's Lyon Arboretum,
about half the plants should be con¬
sidered endangered, even if they do
not yet figure on official lists.
There are also 5,000 species
brought from outside, 25 of which
are especially destructive. The worst
offenders are the firetree (Myrica
faya) from the Canary Islands, the
strawberry guava (l'sidium cat-
tleianum) a tree from Brazil, the
banana poka vine (Passiflora molis-
sima) from South America, and
FRANCE BEQUETTE
¡s a Franco-American
journalist.
A volcanic sulphur "Coster's curse" (Clidemia hirta) a
" shrub from Central America. They
all proliferate, smothering native
plants. But war has been declared on
them. In one case, an insect has been
imported from the Canary Islands
in order to combat its compatriot
plant, the firetree, but results are
slow in coming. A botanist with theNational Park, Linda Pratt, tried
various herbicides, but it is an uphill
job because of the risk of destroying
innocuous plants and polluting the
water. Widespread "Wanted Dead
or Alive" posters display the name
and photo of the miconia, a prolific
tree that must be destroyed before itoverruns the island, as it is threaten¬
ing to do in Tahiti (French Polynesia)
where it has already invaded three-
quarters of the wooded area.
Protecting the park also means
eliminating certain species of land
mammals that were introduced by
humans. To do so, Park Superinten¬dent Jim Martin has taken the unusual
stej) of enrolling the help of poach¬
ers. Some may feel sad about getting
rid of feral cats, but they plunder the
eggs and young of a threatened
species, the dark-rumped petrel
(Pterodroma phueopygia sandvi-
censis). Feral goats were virtually
eradicated with the help of localhunters. Their number has fallen from
15,000 in 1980 to less than 100.
Although 11,000 feral pigs werekilled between 1930 and 1970, it
is estimated that around 4,000 still
survive.
In addition to hunting, building
g fences is a good, albeit costly solu-Sjj*. J I tion. Jim Martin says that money is
Tree ferns on the
island of Hawaii.
lacking. There are only eightrangers, whereas from fifteen to
twenty are needed for proper sur¬veillance. The Park can no longerafford to pay researchers. Those
who come to study there belong to
outside organizations. In protest, thePark closed down in November 1995
but had to re-open after three weeks
when the public, which had initially
been supportive, lost patience.
The situation is particularly wor¬risome because the Park is in a dan¬
gerous area. Coastal cliffs crumble,
and lava can erupt at any moment,since Mauna Loa and Kilauea are two
of the world's most active volcanoes.
Cuttings had to be made in some ofthe most recent lava flows in order to
re-open some of the roads.
Uses and abuses
Although Volcanoes Park is a well-
defined central area of the Big
Island, maps do not yet show eitherthe buffer or the intermediate zones
required by a biosphere reserve. Jim
Martin explains that there is an
understanding with the federal
prison and the private lands that bor¬
der the park and that a development
plan is being worked out. New build¬
ings in a nearby village will blend with
the forest and cause no damage.
A more serious problem arisesfrom the fact that Hawaii has been in
a catastrophic economic situation
since the collapse of world sugar
prices. Sugar cane fields have been
abandoned, and jobless labourers are
growing marijuana even inside the
park boundaries. By clearing forest
land for their crops and protecting
THE UNESCO Q)URIERB NOVEMBER IWö41
them with lethal traps, they areendangering the ecosystem. Heavy
fines and long prison sentences, how¬
ever, have helped to improve thesituation.
But this is not all. Tree ferns are
being cut down with chainsaws and
hauled away in truck loads and,
despite the presence of surveillance
cameras, vandals are stealing archae¬
ological treasures. The Park was
included on UNESCO's World HeritageList in 1987 and contains once-inhab¬
ited caves, vestiges of villages andfragile petroglyphs, some of which
have recently been covered over by alava flow.
The Hawaiian Volcano Obser¬
vatory, founded in 1912 and located
within the park on the edge of theKilauea caldera, plays a major role inrunning the park. Ground deforma¬
tion, gas emissions, changes in the elec¬
trical, magnetic and gravitational
fields and lava movements are closely
initiatives
11..' -;"JS'*
! -
Sj%-/ .
monitored in an attempt to anticipate
dangerous seismic activity. Lava is at
present flowing abundantly in a part ofthe Park that has been closed to the
public. At night fiery rivers flow
through the countryside and down
mountainsides to the sea, sending
huge billows of red-tinted steam into
the air.
Liquid lava
fountains and
flows on Hawaii's
Mauna Loa
volcano.
1 Tliere are currently 337 of these. Editor
Carrots and DDT
Visalia is a small farming community in California (USA) about halfway between San Franciscoand Los Angeles. Near its tiny airport is a field surrounded by a tall fence with unusual signsattached to it at tegular intervals. The signs show a carrot and two sentences in the Miao language.
Back in 1947 a crop-dusting company set up shop in a corner of the airport. From 1946to 1972 DDT pesticide was the most widely used insect-killer in the world. Since 1973. how¬
ever, it has been banned in the I nited States. Stored
in drums on the ground, the DDT was transferred to
the tanks of the crop-dusting biplanes, which were
then rinsed out after each sortie. The empty drumswere stacked up in a basin.
In 1984 the American Department of Healthinspected the land. The crop-dusting company hadlong since disappeared, but not the DDT residue that
was discovered in the soil. Fortunately it was neithervery soluble nor volatile and had contaminated only atopsoil layer 15 centimetres deep, or about 8,300 m3
of land. It had to be cleaned up. Rut none of the stan¬
dard solutions seemed very suitable: stripping the soiland treating it thermically would have cost $2 million. Dumping it in an uninhabited area wouldhave required constant supervision.
Then, engineer Dennis Keller came up with the idea of planting carrots. It is true that each
crop costs $170,000 (still less expensive than heat treatment), but the carrots suck up 50 pet-cent of the DDT remaining in the soil. Carrots, especially the large French variety calledScarlet of Nantes are the only vegetable able to concentrate this kind of pesticide in its tis¬sue, not just its skin, as was generally believed, but in its core and roots too. The carrots are
then dried out and burned. Dennis Keller says that the carrot idea is also being used to cleanup DDT in Australia.
As for the fenced-in area and its strange signs, put up in 1992, they are there to preventthe Miaos, refugees from the Vietnamese war. from poaching the carrots. The land must waita certain amount of time before being handed over to promoters. The admissible DDT levelof 1.4 mg. per kg of earth has not yet been attained.
© France Bequette, Pans
world
THE MIGHTY
SHRIMP
Land-owners, road builders and
developers in the state of
California (U.S.A.) are up inarms at the federal government,which has effectively put mil¬lions of hectares of land off-lim¬
its to development by refusingto take the fairy-shrimp, a smallcrustacean, off the endangeredspecies list. In 1978 a biologistestimated that 90 per cent ofthe shrimp's habitat had beenlost, a claim denied by otherexperts, who assert that the tinycreature is actually flourishing.In 1995 a thousand Californians
joined in a demonstration to
demand the removal of the tinyfreshwater shrimp from the listof threatened species. Accordingto California's Governor what is
endangered is not the fairyshrimp hut the state's economicdevelopment. I
INSECT OPERA
ON CD
320 million years ago, insectsounds were already to be heardrising from the ferns of the car¬boniferous period. Althoughmany people today are familiarwith the singing of crickets,cicadas and grasshoppers, otherinsects, like the termite, the ant
or the weevil, produce love calls,threats and courtship or accep¬tance noises that are inaudible
to the human ear because theyare too weak and/or too high(ultrasounds) or low (infra¬sounds). Now, thanks to highlysophisticated recording tech¬niques, the sounds of 50 insectspecies found in France havebeen recorded and made audible
on a compact disk. Presented asan opera, the disk is accompa¬nied by a 200-page explanatory"libretto" and colour photos.The authors, André-JacquesAndrieu and Bernard Dttmortier,arc members of the French
National Institute of AgronomicResearch (1NRA).
Entomophonia,
Andre-Jacques Andrien amiBernard Dumorlier, IINUA, 1994.
THE UNESCoQlURILRl NOVEMBER 1996
world world world
YOUNG REPORTERS
FOR
THE ENVIRONMENT
In 1994 the Foundation for
Environmental Education in
Europe (FEEE), a non-govern¬mental organization, launched"Young Reporters for theEnvironment", an interdisciplinaryproject for selected groups ofhigh school students, who aregiven basic training in journalismand travel the world to report onenvironmental issues. Their 1996
missions have focused on solar
energy, hydroclcctricity, thedynamics of atmospheric fluxesin the Mediterranean Sea and the
polar environment. On missions toViet Nam, Quebec (Canada),France and Spitsbergen (theSvalbard Islands), young reporterscommunicated via the Internet
with their "colleagues" backhome in school. A selection of
their best articles, printed underthe title "Magazine", is availableupon request from FEEE nationaloffices. The Foundation also pub¬lishes a newsletter (in English andFrench) which is a mine of infor¬mation for anyone interested inenvironmental education and who
might like to join a network.
rnitetl Kingdom: Mr. Graham
Hashwoilh, Tidy rlrilain Group,The l'ier, Vi'ipan, WINS 4EX.
Tel: (11)1912.72.16.20;
Fax: (11)19-12.82. 17.78.
1 relamí: Ms. Patricia Oliver or Ms.
Jo Cooke, An Taisce, The Tailors'
Hall, Back Lane, Duhlin 8.
Tel: (353)1 151.17.86;
Fax: (353) 1 153.32.55.
DOUBTS ABOUT
POLYSTYRENE
Polystyrene, a blown plastic prod¬uct made from petroleum andfound washed up on almost everybeach in the world, is taking upmore and more space in house¬hold waste. It is used as insula¬
tion in buildings, and especiallyfor making cups and food pack¬aging costing two or three timesless than paper. Rut while it ismuch cheaper to manufacturethan paper (requiring 36 timesless electricity and half as muchwater for cooling), it is more dif¬ficult and expensive to recyclethan paper. Recycled polystyrenecosts 25% more to produce thannew polystyrene.
GOOD NEWS
FOR LAKE BAIKAL
Biologically rich Lake Baikalcontains 2,600 animal and plantspecies, 1,500 of which, likethe freshwater seal, are
endemic. It is the oldest, the
deepest and, in the opinion ofmany, the most beautiful fresh¬water lake in the world, lint for
the past 30 years it has beenpolluted by waste ejected into itby a cellulose factory on itssouthern shore, the only factoryto evacuate its waste directlyinto the lake. Although the cityof Irkutsk is ready to pay partof the costs of shutting downthe factory, the problem of find¬ing jobs for its 3,000 employeeshas not yet been solved. I
THE WORLD BANK
GOES GREEN
With $10 billion in its environ¬
mental portfolio for 137 projectsin 62 countries, the World Bank
is now the world's leadingfinancier of environmental pro¬jects in the developing world.According to its 1995 environmentannual report, Mainstreaming theEnvironment, the Bank is deter
mined to "address the social
dimensions of environmental man¬
agement, ensuring that stake¬
holders are involved in the designand implementation of projects".For Ismail Serageldin, Vice-President for environmentally
sustainable development, it is aquestion of "greening the entire
portfolio of the Bank".
CLEANSING
SEED
British researcher Geoff
Folkard has recently confirmed
scientifically that the seeds ofthe Moringa oleífera tree havea purifying effect, somethingwhich has long been known incertain African countries. When
pressed, the seeds liberate pro¬teins that draw bacteria, virusesand other water-borne micro¬
organisms to them like magnets.The pollutants bunch up andcan then be got rid of simply byfiltering the water. Moringaoleíferas virtues do not stopthere. Not only can the tree
grow in poor soil, its leaves andflowers are filled with vitamins
and other nutritious substances.
Its seeds also provide oil forlamps and snap.
THE UNESCO Ç)URIIERB NOVEMBER IQ9643
HERITAGE
aroque churches
of the Philippinesby Augusto Fabella Villalón
An original form of religious architecture arose when European baroque came to the Philippines
Flanked with
massive anti-
earthquake
buttresses, St.
Augustine's
church at Paoay
(llocos Norte
province) isa
remarkable
example of whathas been called
"seismic
baroque".
Five hundred years ago, when Spain
was at the height of her power, the
Philippines were the Spanish
empire's easternmost fringe. The jour¬
ney from Madrid to the faraway
colony took many months. A trans-
Atlantic crossing to South America
was followed by an overland journey to
Acapulco in Mexico, and then a voyage
across the Pacific from Acapulco to
Manila, the Philippine capital.From the sixteenth to the nine¬
teenth centuries, many Spanish fri¬ars embarked on this hazardous
journey in order to spread the word
of God in their country's Asian out
post. When they arrived in the
Philippines, they discovered an agri¬
cultural and seafaring society.
People lived in huts built of bam¬
boo, rattan and palm clustered alongthe seashore or on river banks. The
huts were raised above the ground
on stilts to prevent damage from sea¬sonal flood waters and looked like
large baskets cradled on poles.
Although they responded per¬
fectly to the tropical island environ¬
ment, these traditional dwellings were
not intended to last forever. They
burned quickly and were easily blown
away by the typhoons that came
yearly. Constructed out of light, ten¬
sile materials, they swayed during
gentle earth tremors but collapsed
with the onset of the powerful earth¬
quakes that periodically ravaged the
country. However, fashioned as theywere out of natural materials that
grew abundantly near the villages,
they could soon be rebuilt.
The Spanish friars, used to large,
lofty, strong stone churches built to
last for a thousand years, did not
regard these impermanent struc¬
tures as proper dwellings for God.
They introduced the Western con¬
cept of permanence in architecture
to the Philippines, and also the use
of stone for building.The friars directed teams of
skilled Filipino and Chinese crafts¬men who were unaware of Western
construction techniques and the for-malistic sensibilities of ecclesiastical
art. The construction of a church
was a community effort, and most
churches in the Philippines cannot
be ascribed to a single designer or
architect. They are the product of
collaborative work by many unknownartisans.
The friars were guided by their
vague recollections of churches they
had seen before leaving their native
Spain, and built structures in a visu¬
ally delightful, highly personalized
Philippine style adapted from
Spanish baroque. As more and morechurches were built, this form of
"peripheral baroque" developed and
44 THE UNESCO QuiRIERB NOVEMBER 1996
captured the imagination of the
Filipinos. A highly individualistic
variant of Spanish colonial archi¬
tecture, it became an enduring, but
today severely endangered, testi¬
mony to the interaction that suc¬
cessfully integrated two diverse cul¬
tures, uniting the visual sensibilitiesof West and East.
In 1993, the following four archi¬
tecturally outstanding Spanish
Colonial churches of the Philippineswere included on the World
Heritage List.
The church of St. Augustine
(Paoay, llocos Norte province)
Built in 1710 by the Augustinians,this ensemble of church and
detached bell tower standing on the
edge of a broad plaza is majestic in
scale. Its triangular, pedimented
façade of soft stone, plain at the bot¬
tom, is decorated with light, elegant
carving near the top of the pediment,
which is edged with a row of stone
ftnials (pinnacle ornaments) like
feathers delicately brushing the sky.
Thick perpendicular stone but¬
tresses protrude from the church
wall to protect the main structure
from earthquakes. The buttresses
are designed as huge double volutes
(swirl forms), and their interplay of
curves and counter-curves gives an
impression of magical lightness.
Reinforcing the Oriental flavour,the bell tower situated a short dis
tance away from the principal
church structure tapers slightly
upwards in layers reminiscent of a
pagoda. Its side entrances are
flanked by floral motifs carved with
a fluidity accentuated by clouds
floating above them. The ethereal
grace of the façade softens the heavy
architectural elements, and the
visual reference linking the archi¬
tecture to the great Indonesian
shrine of lîorobudur brings an
Oriental aspect to the Catholic rit¬
uals performed inside the church.
The church of Our Lady
of the Assumption
(Santa Maria, llocos Sur province)
This ensemble of church and parish
residence built by the Augustiniansoverlooks the town of Santa Maria
from a platform atop a flight of
eighty-five steps made of wide gran¬
ite blocks imported from China.
Instead of its façade, it presents its
austere, almost windowless sides to
the town below. The residence, con¬
nected by an arcaded bridge to thechurch structure, faces the church
and completes the architecturalensemble. As with the church of St.
Augustine at Paoay, buttresses swirl
upwards to reinforce the side walls
against earthquake damage. The
detached pagoda-like bell towerstands a short distance from the main
façade to prevent it from falling on
the main structure if is toppled by an
The church of Our
Lady of the
Assumption at
Santa Maria
(llocos Sur
province) and Its
detached bell-
tower.
St. Augustine'schurch in the old
walled district of
Manila.
earthquake. The charm of the Santa
Maria ensemble lies in its hilltop set¬
ting. The church buildings implanted
solidly above the town resemble a for¬tified medieval citadel.
The church of St. Augustine
(Intramuros, Manila)
Ruilt in 1587 under the direction of
Augustinians, this is the oldest exist¬
ing stone church in the Philippines
and one of few examples of ecclesi¬
astical architecture in the Intramuros,
the fortified settlement built by the
Spaniards along the shores of Manila
Hay. Huilt as the Mother House of
the Augustinian Order in the
Philippines and in Asia, the
Renaissance style complex includes
the main church, monasteries, clois¬
ters and botanical gardens. Theensemble is contained within an entire
city block. The austere façade of the
church faces a small plaza guarded
by a pair of Chinese stone dogs.
Instead of extending outwards from
the walls, the thick buttresses built
to protect the church against earth¬
quake damage are incorporated
inside the building in a series of sump¬
tuously decorated side chapels lin¬
ing both sides of the church. The only
THE UNESCO (¿URI ERB NOVEMBER 199645
Philippine church to have withstood
typhoons and earthquakes, a revolu¬
tion , the ravages of a world wa r and an
occupation, the church houses one
of the country's leading collections ofecclesiastical art and rare books.
Church of St. Thomas of Villanueva
(Miag-ao, Iloilo province)
Completed in 1797, this church is
one of the most lyrical, exuberant
examples of Philippine culture's
translation of Western baroque designprinciples into a hybrid local style.
Constructed on a rise overlooking the
sea, the church originally served as a
fortress to protect the villagers frompirate raids. Its basic architectural
composition follows the Philippine
archetype of a simply roofed, solid
and squat rectangular structure. A
pedimented façade was grafted onto
the front of the otherwise plain struc¬ture. A pair of squat, non-symmetri¬cal bell towers, which also once acted
as lookout towers to alert the villagers
in times of danger, taper upwardsfrom a square base. The two towers,
although of unequal height, provide
a strong upward thrust while visu¬
ally anchoring each side of the
façade. On the façade itself, heavilyincised relief carving with a remark¬
able three-dimensional qualitydepicts St. Christopher dressed as aFilipino farmer carrying the Christ-
AUGUSTO FABELLA V1LLAL0N
is a Filipino sociologist, architect and arthistorian.
St. Augustine's church In the old walled
district of Manila is the most famous
religious monument in the Philippine
capital. It contains a notable collection of
sacred art.
child on his shoulders across a river
framed by luxuriant tropical vegeta¬
tion. The powerful composition of
highly exaggerated, undulating archi¬tectural details in constant movement
arc Philippine exuberance at its best,
a true visual pleasure.
These churches where Filipinos
still continue to worship illustratethe success with which this culture
has completely and effortlessly
bridged East and West, forming a
distinctively recognizable, multi¬
cultural but nevertheless totally
Filipino identity. I
KEY DATES
1521
Ferdinand Magellan claims the Philippines for the Spanish
crown but is killed in the island of Mactan. His crew returns to
Spain by circumnavigating the world for the first time.
1571
Establishment of Manila. Construction of the fortifications of
Intramuros.
1587-1606
Construction of the church of St. Augustine, Intramuros
(Manila). 1854: extensive façade renovations by Don Luciano
Oliver, Municipal Architect of Manila. 1863: one tower
damaged by earthquake and never rebuilt.
1710
Completion of St. Augustine's church, Paoay
(llocos Norte province).
1765-1810
Construction of the existing church of Our Lady of the
Assumption, Santa María (llocos Sur province).
1768-1797
Construction of St. Thomas of Villanueva, Miag-ao
(Iloilo province).
1898
End of Spanish era.
1945
Granting of independence to the Philippines.
The imposing church of St. Thomas of
Villanueva at Miag-ao (Iloilo Province).
46 THE UNESCO QujRIERB NOVEMBER 1996
LISTENING
A modern Catalan composer whose work deserves to be better known
The hidden voice of
Federico Mompou
Federico Mompou i Dcncausse (1893-1987)is an emblematic figure of Catalan music.He was not, as some have claimed, a some¬
what precious miniaturist or a poor man'sDebussy, but one of the most unusual and
important Spanish composers of his time.His work consists largely of short piecesfor piano and voice, but he also wrote for
guitar, French horn, organ and chamberorchestra. Mompou's music, often melan¬
choly in tone, and tinged with a poetry thatis at once concise and visionary, reaches
the deepest, most secret recesses of thelistener's sensibility.
"The mystery of Mompou eludes us assoon as we try to label it or fit it into reflex¬
ive categories," wrote the French philoso¬
pher Vladimir Jankélévitch. "But we canperceive that secret and inimitable voice,which is the very voice of silence: we hearthat voice with the ear of the soul when
'loneliness becomes music'."1 In the four
volumes of his restrained and unadorned
musical testament, Música Callada (Musicthat Falls Silent, 1959-67), which was
inspired by the great Spanish mystic, St.John of the Cross, Mompou achieves max¬
imum expression with a minimum of means.The music in it is silent, he said, because "it
is heard internally. Its emotion is secret,
and becomes sound only by reverberating inthe coldness of our solitude."
Mompou, the contemporary of anothergreat Catalan artist, Joan Miró, whoseenthusiasm and freshness of inspirationwere similar to his own, was born in
Barcelona on 16 April 1893, to a mother ofFrench descent and a Catalan father. He
was fascinated during his childhood thememory was to haunt him all his life bythe sound of the bells in his grandfather'sfoundry. He studied the piano at theConservatori del Liceu in Barcelona and
attended concerts by the greatest pianistsof the time. He himself gave a recital at
ISABELLE LEYMARIE
is a Franco-American musicologist.
by Isabelle Leymarie
the age of fifteen which included works byMozart, Schubert, Crieg and Mendelssohn.
His debut as a pianist suggested he wasdestined for a brilliant career. But Fauré's
music, which he first heard in 1909, came asa revelation to him and made him decide to
become a composer. In 1911, armed with aletter of introduction from the composer
Enrique Granados (1867-1916), he settledin Paris and entered the Conservatoire,
where he studied piano and harmony. Hethen devised his own harmonic system,
which, with its unexpected chords, wasImpressionistic in atmosphere but governedby a totally original logic. His motto became"recomendar", which means returning to the
spiri t of the "primitives" in musical compo¬sition. He rejected modulation, the bar line
and counterpoint and was fond of "impon¬derable tones" (Vladimir Jankélévitch).
Between 1913 and 1921 Mompou wrotesome of his most accomplished works for
piano, including Pessebres (Cribs), Escenesd'Infants (Children's Scenes) and Suburbis(Sul)tirbs), which sought to express "thesound of an atmosphere, the gossamer light¬
ness of a feeling, the parenthesis of a quaintepisode," in the words of the Catalan musi¬cologist, Lluis Millet. While in Paris, thena hive of musical creativity, Mompou met
the composers Maurice Bavcl and ErikSatie, among others, and became friendswith several of his compatriots, such as the
sculptor Apelles Fenosa and the paintersMiquel Renom and Celso Lagar.
When the First World War broke out in
1914, Mompou returned to Barcelona andtook part in the Catalan renaissance move¬ment, Noucentisme. In 1921 he returned to
Paris, where his compositions soon won a rep¬utation, and remained there, apart from theoccasional visit to his home town, until the
Nazi Occupation nineteen years later. By theend of the 1920s be bad written the first
cycle of his Cançons i Danses (Songs andDances), the first two Preludes, other pianopieces and a number of songs. Although hisfriends included Francis Poulenc and
Georges Auric, he refused to join the Groupof Six2, preferring to remain independent.
During the 1930s Mompou went
through an unhappy patch in which he was
less prolific. He returned to Barcelona in
1941 and joined the Independent CatalanComposers' movement, while keeping uphis links with French musicians. He mixed
with writers and publishers, and set to
music the poetry of his Catalan friend,Josep Janes i Olivé. But above all he met
the young pianist Carme Bravo, whom hemarried a few years later. lie then decidedto make a fresh start as a composer, and
enjoyed an unparalleled spell of renewedcreativity. The works he composed during
this period included some new Cançons iDanses, a set of Variations on a Theme by
Chopin, and Cantar del Alma (Song of theSoul) for choir and orchestra, which was
also inspired by St. John of the Cross. In
1967 he completed the final volume of hisMúsica Callada, none of whose seven short
pieces is given a faster tempo than tempomoderato. The pianist Alicia de Larrocha,
the dedicatee of the work, gave its first
performance in Cadaques in 1972.
Mompou was an isolated figure whorebelled against convention and always
remained true to his own temperament and
sensibility. Freed from the constraints of
bar lines, tonality and established forms, he
is as different from Wagner and Schoenbergas he is from his Spanish predecessors,Manuel de Falla, Albéniz and Granados
(the last two were also born in Catalonia,
but belonged to other movements), andfrom Debussy. He belonged to an age-oldtradition of Mediterranean music. He some¬
times quotes from his favourite Catalantunes in Cançons i Danses, and from work¬
ing-class songs in Suburbis, though he
rejects nationalism and folklore. His Iberian
high spirits, which contrast with his moreincantatory and dreamlike leanings, are
chiefly to be found in Gitano, the last of hisImpressions Intimes, and in some of his
Fêtes Lointaines. Mompou plumbed themystical sources of the universe in Cants
Magics and Charmes.
Mompou, who died on 30 June 1987,
wrote his own epitaph:"Death blesses the union
of the soul with silence.
Sleep and rest, my heart,
Eternity gives you a serenade and
you're lulled byThe greatest love of all." I
1. In Albéniz, Séuérac, Mompou et la Presence
Lointaine, by \ ladimir Jankélévitch, Seuil
publishers, Paris, 1983.
2. A group of six young French composers formedin Paris in 1918. Its members were Darius M il lia ml -
Arthur Ilonegger, Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc,
Louis Durey and Germaine Tailleferre. They
adopted Frik Satie as their spiritual mentor. Ed.
THE UNESCO lOURIER! NOVEMBER 199647
Anniversary
ean PiaaetSwiss psychologist (1896-1980)
A foundational
thinkerby Richard Schumaker
¿* This year educational institutions,
professional journals and international
organizations of all kinds are com¬
memorating the centenary of Jean Piaget's birth. Born on 9
August 1896 at Neuchâtel (Switzerland), this biologist, psy¬
chologist and philosopher altered and deepened our under¬
standing of human life. Primarily known as a child psychologist,
he used his research on young children as a springboard to a bet¬
ter understanding of the human personality. As our century
comes to a close, not a single area of the human sciences can
escape the influence balanced, humane and original of Jean
Piaget.
The child as active agent
Piaget is probably best known for his writing on the early life
of children. His importance in this field derives principally
from his innovative methods and ambitious goals. Instead of
applying adult preconceptions and social norms to the study
of childhood, Piaget tried to describe and evaluate the point
of view of the developing child. In essence, he attempted to
reconstruct the daily life of the child in all its confusion, tur¬
moil and anxiety. This methodological innovation resulted in
discoveries that upset some of our most complacently held
beliefs about childhood.
In hundreds of articles and books, Piaget showed that there
is almost nothing absolute or static in a child's mental life. Even
seemingly fundamental notions such as space, time, relation
and causality are constructed through trial and error in the
RICHARD SCHUMAKER,
of the United States, is editor of Focus,
a review of 20th-century literature.
© Keystone. Paris
course of the child's early years. Moreover, the whole edifice
of the adult personality its rationality, its morality, its very
perceptual stability is founded on the physical processes of
the child's early years. Piaget was very fond of the analogy of
"grasping"; before one can grasp an idea, one must learn to
grasp concrete objects. The infant's earliest, faltering move¬
ments prepare and foreshadow its later development.
Childhood as touchstone
Piaget also studied how this early landscape of the child
evolves from year to year. Once again, he emphasized the ten¬
tative trial-and-error nature of the child's world. Although he
charted an intricately structured course from birth to the
assumption of the complex responsibilities of life, this evo¬
lution is discontinuous and constantly interrupted by conflicts
with the child's surroundings. Thus, Piaget's account of the
stages of early life is much more realistic and less tendentious
than the accounts of Freud, Erikson or Maslow.
Piaget's firm grasp of the flux of early life allowed him to
use his studies of childhood as a platform for something even
deeper the identification of the essential traits of life itself.
The processes and structures of early life were used as clues
48THE UNESCO QlURII1ER! NOVEMBER I99Ö
to the nature of life in all its generality. At this level of study,
Piaget was breaking new ground in Western thought.
Instead of rejecting childhood as beneath the dignity of
serious philosophical study, Piaget, who after all read widely
in philosophy all his life insists that only a close study of
infancy would allow us to slip beneath prejudice and habit
and enable us to see life in something like its true condition.
From Neuchâtel to the international scene
From his earliest years, Piaget demonstrated both interest
and talent in the natural sciences, sending a paper on albino
sparrows to a Neuchâtel journal at the age of ten. By 1916,
he had published twenty papers on molluscs. These papers
were valuable enough to bring him into consideration for a
curator's position at the Museum of Natural History in
Geneva. In an autobiographical sketch,1 Piaget relates that
it was necessary to refuse this prestigious position because
"[he] still had two years to go before finishing [his] secondary
education".
In his twenties, Piaget developed an interest in psychologi¬
cal problems and worked with Theodore Simon, a collabora¬
tor in the Binet scale of intelligence. It was during this time
that he worked in Eugen Bleuler'« psychiatric clinic in Zurich
and became acquainted with the clinical method he would
later use in such an innovative fashion in his own research.
Piaget held numerous academic posts in Switzerland and
France after he received his doctorate in zoology in 1918, but
was never a reclusive or overly specialized researcher. From
the early 1920s he realized that his ambitious intellectual
goals would require collaboration and international dialogue.
For decades he was associated with the Jean-Jacques
Rousseau Institute in Geneva (now the Institute of
Educational Sciences). In 1956 he persuaded the Rockefeller
Foundation to financially assist his International Institute, of
Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva. He was
actively associated with UmïSCO as a member of its Executive
Board, as director of the International Bureau of Education
(IBE), and for a short time as Assistant Director-General for
Education.
Jean Piaget may be termed a foundational thinker. He
delved beneath prejudices, biases and encrusted habits in
order to uncover the essential well-springs of cognitive life.
This constituted a liberation of energies which in turn laid
the foundation for growth and renewal in both individuals and
societies. Piaget's work, combining enormous breadth of
learning with a powerful focus on life's essential questions,
is without doubt one of our century's greatest treasures. M
As it was...
THE UNESCO G)UR,ERNovember 1980
The psychologyof marblesby Jean Piaget
1 Cahiers Vilfre tic» Parcto, 1966 no 10, Geneva, Diaz. Author s note.
Children's games constitute the mostadmirable social institutions. The gameol marbles, for instance, contains an
extremely complex system of rules which constitute a well-marked social reality, "independent of individuals" and trans¬mitted, like a language, from one generation to another.
We simply asked ourselves (1) how the individuals adaptthemselves to these rules, i.e. how they observe rules at eachage and level of mental development; (2) how far they becomeconscious of rules, in other words, what types of obligationresult (always according to the children's ages) from theincreasing ascendancy exercised by rules.
During the first part, it is sufficient to ask the childrenhow one plays marbles. "Teach me the rules anil I'll play withyou." The child then draws a square, takes half the marbles,puts down his "pose", and the game begins. It is importantto bear in mind all possible contingencies of the game and toask the child about each. This means that you must avoidmaking any suggestions. All you need to do is to appear com¬pletely ignorant, and even to make intentional mistakes so thatthe child may each time point out clearly what the rule is.Naturally, you must take the whole thing very seriously, allthrough the game. Then you ask who has won and why, andif everything is not quite clear, you begin a new set.
Then comes the second part of the interrogatory, that,namely, which bears upon the consciousness of rules. You beginby asking the child if he could invent a new rule. Once [it] hasbeen formulated, you ask the child whether it could give riseto a new game: "Would it be all right to play like that with your
pals? The child either agrees to the suggestion or disputes it.If he agrees, you immediately ask him whether the new ruleis a "(air rule, a "real" rule, one "like the others", and try toget at the various motives that enter into the answers.
If. on the other band, the child disagrees with all this, youask whether the new rule could not by being generalizedbecome a real rule. "When you are a big boy, suppose von tellyour new rule to a lot of children, then perhaps they'll all playthat way and everyone will forget the old rulo, riten which rulewill be fairest yours that everyone knows, or the old one thateveryone has forgotten?" The main point is to find out whetherone may legitimately alter rules and whether a rule is fair or justbecause it conforms to general usage (even ncwlv introduced),or because it is endowed with an intrinsic and eternal value.
Having cleared up this point it will be easy enough to askthe two following questions. (1) Have people always played as
THE UNESCO lOURILKB S'OVIMBER IW;49
THE PIAGET CENTENARY
Through its International Bureau of Education (IBE), Unesco is
closely associated with many of the celebrations, including sem¬
inars, publications and exhibitions, which are marking the cen¬
tenary of Jean Piaget's birth. An issue of the international edu¬
cational journal Prospects (vol. XXVI, n° 1, March 1996) was
devoted to a study of the topicality of Piaget's educational think¬
ing. The 45th session of the International Education Conference,
which was held in Geneva during the first week of October 1996,
examined the role of teachers in a changing world and included
a round table meeting on Piaget and education. An exhibition on
Piaget's life was shown during the Conference and was later pre¬
sented at Unesco's Paris Headquarters during the 150th session
of the Organization's Executive Board. A symposium on "Piaget
after Piaget", organized with Unesco support, is being held on
15 and 16 November 1996 at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
(For further information, tel: (33 0) 1 46 33 14 45; Fax: (33 0) 1
40 46 96 51).
they do today? (2) What is the origin of rules: Are they inventedby children or laid down by parents and grown-ups in general?
The main thing is to grasp the child's mental orientation.Does he believe in the mystical value of rules or in their final¬ity? Does he subscribe to a heteronymy of divine law, or ishe conscious of his own autonomy? This is the only questionthat interests us. The child has naturally got no ready-madebeliefs on the origin and endurance of the rules of his games;the ideas which he invents then and there are only indices ofhis fundamental attitude.
In practiceFrom the point of view of the practice or application of rulesfour successive stages can be distinguished.
A first stage of a purely motor and individual character,during which the child handles the marbles at the dictationof his desires and motor habits. This leads to the formation
of more or less ritualized schémas, but since play is stillpurely individual, one can only talk of motor rules and not oftruly collective rules.
The second may be called egocentric. This stage beginsat the moment when the child receives from outside the
example of codified rules, that is to say, some time betweenthe ages of two and five. But though the child imitates thisexample, he continues to play either by himself without both¬ering to find play-fellows, or with others, but without tryingto win, and therefore without attempting to unify the dif¬ferent ways of playing. In other words, children of this stage,even when they are playing together, play each one "on hisown" (everyone can win at once) and without regard for anycodification of rules.
A third stage appears between seven antl eight, which wecall the stage of incipient co-operation. Each player now triesto win, and all, therefore, begin to concern themselves with thequestion of mutual control and of unification of the rules. Butwhile a certain agreement may be reached in the course of onegame, ideas about the rules in general are still rather vague.
Finally, between the years of eleven and twelve, appears afourth stage, which is that of the codification ofrules. Not onlyis every detail of procedure in the game fixed, but the actualcode of rules to be observed is known to the whole society.
These stages must of course be taken only for what they
W THE UNESCofoUR'ER" NOVEMBER I99Û
are worth. It is convenient for the purposes of exposition todivide the children up in age-classes or stages, but the factspresent themselves as a continuum which cannot be cut upinto sections. This continuum, moreover, is not linear in char¬
acter, antl its general tlirection can only be observed byschematizing the material antl ignoring the minor oscillationswhich render it infinitely complicated in detail.
Consciousness of rules
Let us turn now to the consciousness of rules, [whose] pro¬gression runs through three stages.
During the first stage rules are not yet coercive in charac¬ter, either because they are purely motor, or else (at thebeginning of the egocentric stage) because they are receivetl,as it were, unconsciously, antl as interesting examples ratherthan as obligatory realities.
During the second stage (apogee of egocentric and firsthalf of co-operating stage) rules are regarded as sacred anduntouchable, emanating from adults and lasting forever. Everysuggested alteration strikes the child as a transgression.
Finally, during the third stage, a rule is looked upon as alaw tlue to mutual consent, which you must respect if youwant to be loyal but which it is permissible to alter on thecondition of enlisting general opinion on your side.
The correlation between the three stages in the develop¬ment of the consciousness of rules and the four stages relat¬ing to their practical observance is of course only a statisti¬cal correlation and therefore very crude. But broadlyspeaking the relation seems to us indisputable.
The collective rule is at first something external to theindividual and consequently sacred to him; then, as he grad¬ually makes it his own, it comes to that extent to be felt asthe free product of mutual agreement antl an autonomousconscience. And with regard to practical use, it is only nat¬ural that a mystical respect for laws shoultl be accompaniedby a rudimentary knowledge and application of their con¬tents, while a rational and well-founded respect is accompa¬nied by an effective application of each rule in detail.
There would therefore seem to be two types of respect forrules corresponding to two types of social behaviour. This con¬clusion deserves to be closely examinetl, for if it holds good,it should be of the greatest value to the analysis of childmorality.
This article was adapted from "The Rules of the Game", a study carried out byJean Piaget (with Mme. V.-J. Piaget and Messrs M. Lambercier and L. Martinez)
which constitutes the first chapter of The Moral Judgment of the Child,published in 1932 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Ltd, London.
Text © Copyright. Reproduction prohibited.
The Seine-Saint-Denis Young People's Book Fair (France)
The Uneco Courier will have a stand at this year's Seine-Saint Denis Young People's
Book Fair to be held from 27 November to 1 December (2 December for the trade
only) In the Paris suburb of Montreuil. The Fair offers a broad spectrum of young
people's literature and selects prizewlnnlng works published in the current year. The
creation of the world will be the theme of an international symposium (25 and 26
November), discussions and exhibitions designed to shed light on how the origins
of humanity and the universe are perceived in different cultures, to promote dia¬
logue between the imaginative process and scientific research, and to consider the
ethical problems raised by cosmogonies.
For further information:
Centre de promotion du livre de jeunesse Seine-Saint Denis,
3, rue François-Debergue, 93100 Montreuil. (France)
Tel: (33) (0) 1 48 57 57 78; Fax: (33) (0) 1 48 57 04 62
THEME OF OUR NEXT ISSUE:
EPHEMERAL ART
HERITAGE:
TAI NATIONAL PARK (CÔTE D'IVOIRE)
ENVIRONMENT:
LAKE FERTÖ (HUNGARY)
Unesco's fiftieth anniversary
Campaign on behalfof renovation
and rehabilitation plansfor Unesco Headquarters
"One cannot be a modernist without first understanding heritage, and one cannot be atraditionalist without first realizing that everything that is built was once modern."
Renzo Piano
Unesco, which today has 185 Member States, is the only institution of the United Nations system
with its headquarters in France.
Inaugurated in 1958, the buildings housing this forum of the world's cultures were designed by
three eminent architects: Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss.
The "three-pointed star" design of the main building, which rests on 72 pilotis, is a fine synthesis
of 20th-century functionalist architecture in which exceptional effects are achieved with reinforced concrete.
Today the building materials are beginning to show their age. The concrete is crumbling, and the
plate-glass windows no longer satisfy energy-saving requirements. In addition, conference room facilities have
been outstripped by growing needs resulting from the increase in the number of Unesco's Member States.
Unesco and its Member States have accordingly adopted a renovation and rehabilitation project
designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, who has reconciled the building's original design with
today's needs. The key words are functionality, openness and respect for the raw materials used.
First of all the entire ground level, including the gardens, will be refitted. Then the public spaces
on the first underground level and the seventh floor will be renovated and decorated. The work will be exe¬
cuted by French architect Jean-François Schmit.
The murals by Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas will once again be located in the open air, as they
were originally designed to be. The public will be able to admire the many other artworks at Unesco
Headquarters, in a newly created "cultural walk": the Japanese garden designed by Isamu Noguchi, the
sculptures by Henry Moore, Robert Jacobsen and Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder's mobile, the new
meditation space by Tadao Ando and the Square of Tolerance sculpture garden by Dani Karavan.
In January 1996, on the initiative of the Headquarters Committee consisting of 25 Unesco
Member States, an appeal was launched to the international community, public and private organizationsand individuals, for contributions in cash or in kind.
For further information, please contact:
Mr. J.-C. Bendana-Pinel
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Division of General Services
7, Place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP, France
Tel: (33'/0) 1 45 68 05 35; Fax: (33'/0') 1 47 83 88 76
Financial contributions may be made to the following special bank accounts, mentioning the plan
("Renovation Plan" or "Rehabilitation Plan") to which you wish to contribute:
Renovation Plan
(In US dollars)
Unesco ref. Renovation Plan - 50th AnniversaryAccount no. 949-1-19-1558
Chase Manhattan Bank
International Money Transfer Division
1 New York Plaza, 5th floor,
New York, NY 10015, United States of America
(In French francs)Unesco réf. Plan de rénovation - 50e anniversaire
Compte n° 30003-03301-00037291180-53
Société Générale, Agence Saint-Dominique
106, rue Saint-Dominique, 75007 Paris, France
Rehabilitation Plan
(In US dollars)Unesco réf. Rehabilitation Plan
Account no. 949-1-19-1558
Chase Manhattan Bank
International Money Transfer Division
1 New York Plaza, 5th floor
New York, NY 10015, United States of America
(In French francs)Unesco réf. Plan de réhabilitation
Compte n° 30003-03301-00037291180-53
Société Générale, Agence Saint-Dominique
106, rue Saint-Dominique, 75007 Paris, France
1 from outside france only. 2 In France only.